Religion's affect outside of religion

[robvalue]

I think that often the more reasonable and liberal theists make themselves appear less reasonable than they are.

For example, they will demand that their morality comes from God/the bible. But in reality, their morality is often almost the same as ours and they just point to bits in the bible that correlate with our shared morality. And they make a wealth of excuses for why they ignore the same parts of the bible we think are horrific. So they hold up the bible as a mirror, whether they realize it or not.

When pressed, they can also explain the morality in the exact same way an atheist does. It's when the morality stops being explaining in the secular way that you've got the religion causing/justifying irrational morality. This may be no issues at all, or maybe just a handful which do impact/restrict their lives unnecessarily.