re: #69 dangerman

a coupla comments from this same study posted at political-wire.com

edited to fix link

Put less charitably, these believers don’t behave as if their faith was really important to them, or even particularly real. What *is* real to them is raw temporal power - and the feeling that it is slipping away.

One could argue that this is what religion has often been about. From the time Christianity became a state sponsored religion, it was used in ways to justify all kinds of terrible things, but mostly to keep the powerful in power and everyone else subservient. It’s just been, for lack of a better word, democratized in the last half century or so.