Do believers really believe?

Religionists claim to believe all kinds of quite startling and implausible things.  But do they really believe them?

There is, for example, life after death -- Heaven and Hell, for Christians or Muslims.  How would a person behave if he genuinely believed this concept, in the straightforward way you or I believe that 2+2=4 or that North America exists?  He would never be sad when a co-believer he loved died, since he would believe that person had gone to Heaven.  After all, would you be sad if you believed that the person you loved had gone on to a much better existence where they would always be happy, and that eventually you would join them there?  And such a true believer would have almost no fear of death.  A little, perhaps, since death is usually painful or at least somewhat unpleasant, but that would be trivial to someone who truly believed death to be merely a gateway to a much happier existence.

Yet most believers mourn their dead pretty much the same way as unbelievers do, and work as hard to avoid death as we do.  Yes, they claim their belief in Heaven as a comfort in such cases, but they don't behave and think the way somebody who truly believed in Heaven would behave and think.

What about prayer?  These people claim to believe in an omniscient (all-knowing) God.  Such a God would already know what you want, and exactly how intensely you want it, and whether you deserve it.  It would make no difference, and therefore no sense, to ask him for it.  Yet Christians do this all the time, and most sects strongly recommend the practice.  When you pray for, say, the life of a friend who is in the hospital, how could that possibly affect God's decision about whether or not to intervene in your friend's favor?  God already knows all about your friend's virtues and faults, how much you care, etc.  It doesn't make sense.  Believers, it seems, do not truly believe their God is all-knowing.  Instead they believe he can be chivvied into doing what they want, even sometimes in trivial matters, by their entreaties.

Consider the behavior of religious leaders.  Corruption and hypocrisy and abuse are rife.  Think of the countless Catholic priests who, as we now know, sexually abuse children.  Think of the systematic policy of the Catholic hierarchy, shielding those priests from exposure, moving them from place to place so they won't get caught and can find fresh victims.  All of this behavior has been going on for decades, probably centuries.  Authoritarian Protestant sects, too, are rife with cases of venerated leaders sexually exploiting women, or committing adultery, or carrying on clandestine homosexual activity, which their religion proclaims to be sinful.

These people are very diligent about hiding their behavior from human witnesses who could expose them to worldly punishment.  But they claim to believe in an all-knowing God who has the power to condemn them to a terrifying eternal punishment after death.  Such a God could not be fooled, and would know very well everything they were doing.  Would religious leaders who truly believed in such a God commit such abuses, "knowing" that no amount of deception could save them from his eventual judgment?  It doesn't make sense.

For that matter, one would expect ordinary believers to behave far more morally than unbelievers, since they similarly believe that their God is seeing everything they do and will severely punish serious misbehavior after death.  Yet this belief does not make most believers behave noticeably better than anyone else does.  In fact, the least religious parts of the US have lower rates of violent crime than the most religious parts, and highly secular societies such as Japan and western Europe have much lower rates than highly religious regions like Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

I grant that some people really do behave in ways consistent with true belief.  The actions of the 9/11 hijackers, for example, actually were logically consistent with Islamic doctrines about jihad and Heaven.  There are stories about the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas baptizing Indian babies and then immediately killing them before they had a chance to sin, to guarantee them entry into Heaven.  From the viewpoint of true belief, this makes sense -- the loss of a normal human life would be insignificant compared to getting eternal paradise rather than eternal torture.  But notice that such behavior (a) is very rare and (b) looks like frightening insanity to almost everyone, including to most Christians.

There may exist, in the human mind, the capacity for a sort of quasi-belief intermediate between actual belief and deception of others -- a kind of deception maintained with such intensity (and with such self-righteousness) that it fools even the self on a very superficial level ("I believe that I believe this").  I can hardly imagine what this would subjectively feel like.  But it seems that the religious belief of most religious people is something like this.  That may account for their weirdly disproportionate outrage when their religion is challenged in some way.  The comforting belief is fragile, and any questioning of it threatens to force them to confront the fact that they're really fooling themselves.

But I don't think most of them really believe the gibberish they claim to believe, not in the plain straightforward way people believe 2+2=4.  They just don't behave the way they would if they did.