If one includes the various "just going through the motions" groups such as the Church of England people discussed earlier, you would have a point. I personally think including people who are functionally non-believers in the group "believers" is stretching things to far.
Not just them, honestly. People like that are on the particularly light end of the "spectrum" in play. You're focusing primarily on the people who are on the particularly deep end of the spectrum. There's quite a lot of room in between the two, and it's quite well populated. That is, of course, before directly invoking the quite notable chunk of theists that identify as non-religious, who should likely be treated as off to the side anyways.
I tend to view Wiccans as non-believers, more people claiming to practice because they think it sounds cool. I could be wrong, I don't know any practitioners.
Wicca's actually quite the interesting religion in a few ways. It's of notable interest here primarily because of how... disorganized and mostly non-dogmatic it is. Some are theists. Some are atheists. There's a very large range of specific beliefs and practices, frequently somewhat customized to the individual. Yes, some practitioners are dabbling for pointedly superficial reasons, but that's something that tends to be the case for most religions that aren't somewhat authoritarian cults (and is far from unknown even in such cults).
There is some usage of the term "pick and choose" which does not indicate whimsy? That implies deep, years long thought and effort? This is a new usage to me.
Yes. To understand that better,
the post directly above the one being quoted here is of pointed relevance. Even many devoutly religious people end up with the feeling that "something's not right here" about something or other, and then choose to believe something that feels more right to them, with barely any justification needed. An old coworker held the position that "Unsaved babies go to heaven and I know this because this is the conclusion that we came to at my Bible Study," for an easy example of how this plays out even with little things. As was also mentioned in the post, numerous Christian denominations and congregation splits can be traced back to people doing much the same thing on a somewhat larger scale.
Is this actually what that term means to you?
You say that like the term necessarily only can mean one specific thing. I tend to depend in fair part on the context to understand how a term is being used. That particular usage is within bounds for the term, so long as it's kept in mind that, like in the context put forth there, most people do not whimsically pick and choose what they believe, even though it's entirely fair to say that most people do pick and choose what they believe (usually based on the filters that they have chosen to employ).
I fail to see how pressing me to defend dann's claim is applying my claim to me. As I do not agree that whimsically picking and choosing one's religious beliefs is an accurate description of believers, I am not going to tell you that I choose what to believe on a whim.
And that's the thing. I'm not pressing you to defend dann's claim. I'm pointing out that you're fighting a straw man. You're the one actually bringing the whimsical claim into play in the first place, if we're basing this on the interaction there and what dann actually said there. When you actually pay attention to what was said instead of jumping to unwarranted conclusions, it doesn't look like dann's claiming that the picking and choosing is being done whimsically, but rather in a manner that's fundamentally much the same as how those who are not religious pick and choose what they believe. This shouldn't be hard to understand.
I also can't parse the highlighted sentence. What are you trying to say there?
That was specifically in response to -
whether it is limiting the discussion to fundamentalist Christians while I am talking about believers in general,
It was intended to make clear that, no, I was not assigning that position or limit to you in the first place. I will furthermore add that that should have been quite pointedly clear from the things that I had actually said anyways and that you failed to catch the obvious there quite points to you allowing your judgement and reading comprehension to be distinctly impaired, which undermines how useful the discourse is. I consider it to be wrong for you to ascribe that claim to dann, as well, from what I've seen, but that's more along the lines of something that just invokes an eyeroll at this point.
