As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

Well, things I think about:

-this ‘Universe’ (seems to me) is so incredibly intelligible and information rich (information theory rise, e.g. entropy timeline of the observable universe).

-there seems to be something rather than nothing

-there doesn’t seem to be anything that happens without a cause (except, it seems to me, our will).

These seem to be important data points… :)

Yes, and ancient Christians asserted that God is love.

Many do accept that love exists in the same way math exists.

> most religions ... have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate.

Is it generally seen as an arm open to debate? I have a very religious friend who has gotten into apologetics in the last 6mo or so, and he explicitly describes it as "defending the faith." That seems much less drawing conclusions from evidence and much more drawing evidence from conclusions.

Maybe he's an exception to apologetics, though, as I know he has some admittedly extreme views in some ways.

> There are religions, there are ideologies, and there are tribalisms. Tribalism is the underlying cause of most of humanity's bad behavior. And unfortunately, it creeps into religions and ideologies more often than not.

I think one needs to go a bit deeper. Tribalism is ~~the~~ an underlying cause, but I believe an even deeper cause lies at the root (or a deeper root at least), one that enables tribalism and all other things higher in the stack: the nature of human consciousness. Consciousness presents us with an illusion (estimation, simulation, perspective, opinion, etc) of reality, and we mistake this for reality itself. What's even stranger about the situation is that we already know this. And yet despite this, we continue on living our lives (our real time behavior) as if this is not actually true.

Worse, I believe that this illusion has been encoded/embedded within portions of the ~fabric of reality. As just one example, look at our language (very simplistic compared to the reality we use it to describe), but more so how we use it (on a real time, day to day basis). Take the word "is", which means "to be". "1 + 1 is 2" is (almost certainly) an objectively and comprehensively true statement. But then take "Tribalism is the underlying cause of most of humanity's bad behavior"...is this almost certainly an objectively and comprehensively true statement? I suspect not. And yet, we use the very same word. And this is an extremely simple, fairly innocuous statement compared to many other examples (say, journalism) where we use this word in a way that implies (is perceived as) being of the "1+1=2" variety, but is actually of the estimation/opinion type (in turn, increasing the magnitude of illusion further, creating an even more powerful coordinated/synchronized illusion).

Now, I'm quite confident that you were speaking casually and can understand the complex nuance in play if you put your mind to it...but what of third parties who ingest information in threads like this, adding portions of it to their model of reality, perhaps even repeating the "truths" they have learned to others? While it's true that many people are able to switch their mind into extreme pedantry mode (for short periods of time with some degree of skill) and pick nits along with me, what is actually happening (in the real world as it is) when they are not in this mode, and are interacting in a complex system with billions of other people who are also not in this mode the vast majority of the time, if ever?

Imagine you have a giant computing cluster with 7 billion nodes, and the software running on every single node is utterly riddled with bugs, a complete mess of continuous errors in computation - might the output of this cluster be suboptimal relative to one that has less bugs?

Perhaps they have priests with costumes, and I am not aware of any alchemy, but are these "shortcomings" in any sort of fundamental, materially important way?