If I might make a charitable interpretation of @sinesalvatorem Community posts, here…
Let’s suppose our goal is to get religious communities to tolerate LGBT people, maybe by becoming less religious or maybe by just being less fundamentalist about it. (And this sort of thing isn’t just religious in origin.)
It makes sense to know just what it is we’re asking them to give up.
Religion actually is a social technology. Coal is an energy technology. That doesn’t mean soot is good for you.
If a non-religious or religious-but-tolerant community can be designed and instantiated, then exiting from previous non-tolerant religious communities has a much lower cost. (Plus there is the issue of everything else society needs.)
Progressive Christianity is a thing. It’s a thing that has existed for several centuries now, which is abundantly available in every city and most small towns in America. If a “religious-but-tolerant” Christianity were a viable option, you should be able to copy and spread the existing progressive churches to good effect. People can and do move from conservative churches to progressive churches if they find that their beliefs grow out of sync with the conservatives.
Of course, by now you’ve probably noticed that progressive Christianity is dramatically less successful than conservative Christianity. There’s probably a reason for that. You should find out what that reason is.
(And it’s not just Christianity. Reformed and Orthodox Judaism have approximately the same relationship. Progressive Islam is much younger than either of those, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t turn out the same way as the others.)
Honestly, from what I can see, the supernatural stuff is part of the glue that holds it all together, and one of the memeplex’s components about it being true to the exclusion of all other worldviews. You can weaken it a little, but if you weaken it too much, it risks falling apart.
Of course, I don’t believe in the supernatural elements, and many of them I find absurd. (More deeply, I find the entire concept of eternal damnation deeply unethical. …though, there are those who believe it’s only salvation or nothing, which has far fewer issues.)
And in many ways, religious tolerance is based on the implicit possibility that one’s religion could be wrong.
For me though, in my interactions with religion, it seems like it’s trying to hack my brain in ways not so different from Social Justice or Communism, so I intuitively resist. Anything that involves an internal shutdown of mental defenses looks like that to me. (This actually pisses off SJ and Communists more than religionists, at least in this country.) On the other hand, there are men out there, criminals, who found their way back into society through religious conversion, and others who staved off suicide, so you won’t see me posting negatively about Christianity in the West that much.
