Over the past couple of weeks, I've been arguing that a certain amount of clarity and openness about what we believe is essential if we are to understand each other better. I've argued against two kinds of retreat into comforting unclarity: the excessive embrace of uncertainty and of mystery.
However, although we might not be clear enough about what we ourselves believe, we are frequently all too clear about what others believe. This is partly a problem of over-generalisation: talking about the religious, Christians or atheists as though they were all of one voice. If we never allowed ourselves to talk in such general terms we'd end up burdened by so many qualifications and caveats we'd never say anything at all. At the same time, the absence of sufficient specificity is a more common problem than its excess – and I am no exception to this rule.
A less obvious problem is that people may accept there are lots of views out there, but they are very confident they know what the genuine version of any given belief looks like, which is usually how the speaker wants it to look. For instance, atheists sometimes feel they don't need to address subtler forms of non-literal religious belief because that's not really what religion is. For instance, in an interview, AC Grayling once told me that "your gentle, moderate Sunday Christian" is "confused, or they're cherry-pickers, or they are hypocrites, or they haven't really thought about it, or they don't really know what they believe". True religion involves belief in mythical beings and anyone who says otherwise is no true believer. At the same time, others claim that the proper way to view religion is as practice not doctrine and that it is those who maintain otherwise who are just wrong.
One problem with this is that there are two senses of "true religion" bouncing around here: what we think it ought to be, in its best form, and what it actually, usually is. It is possible that most religion is as the atheists describe it, but that in its best form it is not like this at all.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that both sides are at least in part describing as well as prescribing, and that their claims are mere assertions. And so the debate about whether religion really requires literal belief in divine beings and realms has become another pantomime, with the likes of Karen Armstrong and Mark Vernon (you decide who to cast as Snow White and Widow Twanky) shouting "oh no it isn't!" while the atheists in the audience cry back "oh yes it is!" But what we should really be shouting is "behind you!" If only we'd look, we'd see a better way to resolve the dispute: evidence. You cannot decide a priori what actual religion really is. To know you need to see what people actually believe and do.