Introduction
As some of you will know, although I am an atheist I don't think that theism is necessarily irrational.
I also think that religion is misunderstood in 'militant' atheist circles. (I used 'militant' for want of a better word - you guys know what I mean...)
The common view is that fundamentalism is real religion and that moderatism is simply those who can't bring themselves to fully accept or reject fundamentalist religion so cherry pick as what suits them. I think that this is a narrow view that misunderstands religion.
So now I've made a claim on what religion isn't, I need to now offer a positive account of what religion is and then provide evidence that my account accurately responds to the real life practices of religious people.

Btw, this isn't accusatory in anyway.
I know that people here like and respect moderates in a lot of ways.
As far as I know I see two main reasons why people here feel the need to target moderates too:
1) Intelectual honesty and consistency - even if a moderate's belief is benign, if it's just as unscientifically supported as the fundamentalist then is it right for us to hold double standards for the ones we like over the ones we dislike? If we genuinely think a moderate's belief to be wrong then should we just pat them on the head and let them believe a falsehood? Do we not respect them enough to be capable of critical thinking and wanting to see the truth?
2) Moderatism feeds fundamentalism - even if moderates themselves are benign, their being there feeds fundamentalism. Fundamentalists get away with a lot because their antics are closely related to practices that are more respected. It takes a lot to distance yourself from mainstream beliefs so the survival of a belief system often requires it to share as much as with mainstream as possible. That the mainstream is 'half way' to fundamentalism gives them much more than they want.

I think that my arguments in this topic will provide a genuine answer to the first one and will possibly offer some ideas in the way of the second.

Preliminaries
Before we go on, I just want to make some clarifications on what it is for a belief to be irrational.
A belief irrational if there is some flaw in the reasoning.
Perhaps a subtle fallacy in conclusions drawn or maybe false premise behind it.
This doesn't mean that the person is irrational in believing it - the RRS accept that the theist themselves might be being rational, i.e. reasoning with the best knowledge they have at that time, but the belief itself isn't rational as their reason would reject it if they knew better.

Another point I think needs acknowledging is the 'context' of calling a belief irrational - why we see it as a bad thing.
If you think about the part that beliefs play in our lives, how we will sit down because we believe a chair is below us - an incorrect belief would lead to us falling.
We need beliefs to be accurate for them to have practical purpose in our lives. Reason is our way of making beliefs as accurate as possible, so to have a belief that is irrational is of little use to us and will affect our decision making for the worse.
So because we need a 'belief' to be accurate and reason is the best way to ensure this accuracy, we want our beliefs to be as rational as possible.
In a similar way, an action is rational if it reason declares it the best way to achieve the aim that it was supposed to.

 

The last point I want to make is one about language.
Language is a very diverse thing and this can lead to all sorts of philosophical confusions.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the fallacy of equivocation - it's when we confuse that the same word can mean two different things.
e.g. A bank is a good place to put money and a bank is on the edge of a river so I should throw my money into the river.
That one was pretty obvious - it's the more subtle ones that cause the real confusion.

Wittgenstein liked to use the word 'game' as an example.
He claimed that the various uses of the word game were related in various ways but were also subtly different.
He claimed that whatever 'essence' of 'definition' you tried to tie down to the word 'game' you could find a game out there that was counter example.
In a similar way, I think that our real world usage of the word 'belief' doesn't quite reduce to the way we were using it above.
Although belief as something that needs to be accurate for practical purposes is a common way we use 'belief', it is not the only way we use that word.
I think that 'religious belief' is subtly different to 'practical belief'.
Not completely different - they will be closely related and the differences will be subtle.
However, the differences will be enough to make a difference on how they ought to be evaluated and thereby leave them different on how they should be judged to be 'rational' or not. With that, I am ready to finally put forward my hypothesis on what religious belief is.

 

The Hypothesis - Religious belief is subtly different to practical belief and these differences warrant a difference in evaluation.
If I am saying that religious belief is to be evaluated differently to practical belief then I need to claim that they have different purposes.
Practical belief has the obvious practical usage - if we want to eat an Orange then we need to know where to find an orange and that our beliefs on where to find an orange will determine our success or failure in this.
My claim is that religious belief has a different purpose. Rather than instant practical use, the value of religious belief is the way it affects our outlook on the world.
That is, the psychological effect that these 'articles of faith' have on our life in general.

So for a religious belief to be valuable/commendable it would have to:
a) Have a positive effect on our life - particularly in our morality and personal meaning and happiness.
b) NOT interfere with our practical rationality - i.e. not contradict our scientific knowledge.

Bear in mind that other than this difference in justification/application, this belief would be pretty much the same.
It would be psychologically similar, 'feel' similar, so if you'd ask someone if <insert religious claim> really happened then they'd say yes.
The only difference would be that they wouldn't "feel right" about applying religious doctrine practically in the same way we do with other beliefs and justify these beliefs by the effect that it has on their life.
My belief that this is the natural state of religion and that literalists on both sides have misunderstood it, both by assuming that religious belief and practical belief are the same thing.
One dismisses religious belief for not holding to the standards of practical belief, the other bastardizes their practical belief in an attempt to unify both together.
(While I both think they've misunderstood religion to the same degree, I think that the dismissal of religion is much less severe than trying to unify them.)
Having said that, while I think that there is argument for moderate religion being natural religion and fundamentalism being the perversion, I'll leave that for another topic as I think there's enough to debate here as it is. For now I'll just settle for the fact that religion/theism can be 'not irrational'.
Notice that I've said 'not irrational' rather than 'rational'.
If religious practice is a different practice to normal belief to be valued in a different way then it's quite likely that the evaluation would be different too.
Rather than rational or irrational, I think that religion is a-rational and would be valued as more 'good/bad' or 'humanitarian/inhuman' rather than 'correct/incorrect' or 'rational/irrational'.

The consequence of this hypothesis would be that there's such thing as 'religious belief' where:
a) The 'beliefs' are like normal belief except do not have direct practical application.
(Any good religion should have clauses like "Thou shalt not put the lord to the test" or "The lord works in mysterious ways" or "God is ultimately beyond man's expectations/understanding&quot
b) The religious belief is to be justified by the positive effect on the person and people.
("Before I accepted Jesus into my life... blah blah blah..." - well, you might not find this convincing but atleast they're arguing for the right thing! )
c) Although they often take care to make sure that there is no direct contradiction between their religious beliefs and practical ones, they don't feel the need to scientifically justify their religious beliefs.
(Hence the employment of 'faith' and the 'God of Gaps')

My argument is simply that moderate religion be judged by it's effect on the person.
There could easily be a counter argument in the form of "But religion is bad for the person psychologically/spiritually/socially too because..." which is fair enough - the only conclusion I am trying to settle here is that moderate religion is to be judged by its effect on the person rather than how well it matches scientific fact. I consider it still possible that even moderate religion might fall flat in the face of this kind of judgement too, but I'd be surprised.

Evidence that moderate religion really is like this and that I'm not merely projecting how I'd like it to be.
So how would I go about providing evidence that religion is 'this way' rather than 'that way'?
I've made two claims about moderates regarding their religious belief, that they don't treat it like practical knowledge and that they justify it by the effect that it has on their lives.
I can justify this by picking out typical behaviours and phrases that we expect from them and show that they fit my theory.

Evidence that moderates don't treat articles of faith like practical knowledge
First see if you can even get out of them a belief that has practical application.
I mean, they do base practices on their religion but not with direct consequences.
The religious practice is justified as a whole for other reasons.
In the meantime, individual beliefs do not have individual applications.

My belief in gravity means that I would happily bet my entire life savings that if I was to hold a plastic ball (you're not going to hustle me with magnets here! ) in the air and let go then it would drop to the ground. Do the moderates have any religious beliefs that they could base bets on in the same way?
A lot of Catholics believe that the bread and wine is transformed into the body and blood of Christ - see what response you get if you ask them what affect eating human flesh and blood has on their diet, and if they happen to be vegetarian then do they pass by the Eucharist?
If you were to ever make the claim "If Christianity was true then God would X and Y - after all, that's the character of the God described!" then they are likely to say that "Religion doesn't work like that", or "You're missing the point" or "The lord works in mysterious ways" or "It's not your place to understand God's plan, just trust."

Are these actions and phrases common to the moderates you're familiar with?
Do you disagree that they are characteristics of moderates or do you disagree that they fit my theory?

Evidence that moderates justify their beliefs on their effect rather than their scientific accuracy/certainty
It's often been said that the rationality that they apply to the other areas of their life seem to bypass the moderate's treatment of religion.
What's more, they vigourously argue that it's just not appropiate, often trying to point out other areas in our life where we don't feel the need to be scientific.
They are fond of the 'God of Gaps' (both unsupported and uncontradicted by science)
Even where contradictions appear between their scientific and religious beliefs, they try to brush them aside as if they didn't matter.
They clearly see their religiousness as a-scientific, living out the NOMA split as described by Gould.

So what happens when you ask them why they believe?
They will talk about morality and meaning.
They will talk about what religion does for them on a daily basis - they clearly draw strength from it.
They often have anecdotes and stories about themselves or friends or even people they've read about.
The stories will often involve a rebellious character who didn't think much to religion, had some problems, accepted religion and that solved them.
They often consider their religion to be an integral part of their moral practice too.
Whether religion really is a help in these things is up for debate - my point is that it's these things that justify or discredit religion.

Another evidence is how they judge differing beliefs.
Moderates tend to be happy that other faiths can lead to God while others who claim to be of the same faith are 'false'.
How do they judge who is close to God and who it not?
Once again it's the character of the believers.
Those religious sects that do bad (e.g. the inquisition, the terrorists, extortionists) etc are those who have lost their way.
(The cheeky bastards even call them atheists!!)
Those of other religions who do good (e.g. peaceful Buddhists) are often seen as being close to God in the eyes of the moderate.

Again, you will have to decide yourselves whether my charitarizing of the moderate fits with your own experience.
I think it's characteristics we're all familiar with, it's just that I'm offering a new interpretation to the data, one that wasn't considered before and one that I personally think fits better.
These examples were the best I could come up with from the top of my head.
The verification/falsification will be a more gradual process.
Now the theory is in your mind, it will subconsciously test it everytime you meet a moderate.
Over time you will gradually get the feeling that the theory fits moderate behaviour or you will find yourself feeling that it doesn't.
(That'll be your subconscious brain functions giving the results of their analysing your experiences)
I'd like to think that means you'll start to agree with me within the year but it's perhaps more likely you'll finally start presenting all those counter examples that your brain has been picking up!!

I guess time will tell!

What does this mean for fundamentalism.
There's always been this misconception towards fundamentalists, that they are the ones who follow the Bible properly rather than cherry pick.
Truth is, they cherry pick just as much as moderates do, if not more so.
Or where they don't they're willing to completely contradict themselves.
You see, religious belief can often mean what you want it to mean at that moment in time.
The religious believer's interpretation of their Holy Book will depend on the Zeitegeist of their time and place.
Fundamentalists do this to a higher degree than anyone.
God is the most loving, caring and understanding when they're trying sell him to people and then turns into a wrathful monster who dishes out eternal damnation when they want to scare you into obedience.
They know the absolute truth about things when they're feeling assertive and want to tell you that X is sinful and that Y actually happened but will declare God beyond all understanding when pressed to give a rational justification for their beliefs.

In the same way, they will play the "This is the hard truth - not what you want God to be..." when arguing with moderates and then pull out the "You rationalists want to take all the mystery of life and turn love and feeling into some mathematical equation" when the sceptics start challenging them on the facts.
They are happy to flip from one to another depending on who they are debating.
I don't think that many people change their mind on a major issue from a single argument.
A single argument might be the final straw the triggers the change in mind but more often than not it takes a several points to be on the back of the mind before the person is open to change. After all, if our idea only has a couple of slight problems we see them as something we can work around, that answers will come to.

Some changes will come around through attacking the purely unscientifficness of religious belief, but I don't think that it will get very far on its own.
After all, when you consider the reasons why people have faith, scientific fact is irrelevent.
Apologetics has never converted anyone, merely helped people who were attracted to the lifestyle of religion and were hoping for a way to find a loophole in their scientific knowledge.
(Is it a coincidence that Strobel found the Christian arguments more convincing after he admired the personality changes in his wife?)
If we want to attack fundamentalism then we want to attack it from all sides at once.
"My beliefs are on faith, on hope and love" is presented as an excuse to dismiss sceptical criticism, perhaps just the day after they used "You can't just believe what you want" to dismiss the humanitarian appeals of moderates.

That's why I see moderates as an ally against fundamentalism rather than a cover for it.
Fundies can only use moderates as cover where the sceptic's remarks affect moderates.
If we were to work with moderates to bring forward the ideal anti-fundy arguments, ones that targeted objective claims while accepting the validity of personal faith, fundamentalism would have no cover at all.
Not that we wouldn't have disagreement and debate with moderates too, just that would be a leisurely topic to debate for fun, rather than one that our politics and future critically hangs on.

Anysway, here's my theory of moderate religion.
Thoughts?