A key issue in the debate around atheism concerns what happens at a cognitive level when we say we believe something. Sam Harris, one of the main voices of the "new atheism" and a researcher in the field of cognitive studies of religion, based his earlier diatribes against religious belief on the explicit and unsupported claim that there is only one cognitive structure to all beliefs: that of a proposition. As he puts it, "Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world." In other words, all beliefs correspond to the form "I believe that S is P," and thus can be evaluated as truth claims based on the availability of evidence for the claim that, indeed, S is P. In light of this position, Harris has consistently defined "faith" as belief without evidence. When societies are dominated by people of faith, people who are compelled to believe unreasonable propositions about the world without evidence, the result is a recipe for intolerance, injustice, and violence.
I should quickly interject here that this impulse to violence is, at the very least, shared by Harris. As he writes, "There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense." The justification for such intolerance from otherwise tolerant people is that, as people of faith, by definition they fall outside of a sphere of civil conversation that other, normal people, inhabit.
Now, in Harris's estimation some 240 million of the currently 300 million inhabitants of the United States fall into the category of people with whom there is just no talking, by virtue of their responses to surveys asking about their religious beliefs. He is also less willing to grant what fellow atheist Richard Dawkins suggests, that a good portion of those responding to such surveys don’t really mean it.
While I am not proposing to undermine such survey responses in the same way Dawkins does, I do in fact suggest that there is a considerable spectrum of possible meanings to the claim to believe that is attributable to so many US citizens. The mere fact that a majority of US Catholics fail to follow the Church's teaching on contraception deeply undermines this conception of implicit unanimity in the way believers believe. More recent research in the neurology of religious belief, including articles co-authored by Harris, has demonstrated perceptible differences in brain activity between religious and non-religious test subjects, and research conducted by Andrew Newberg and others has revealed different brain activity within the same subject when that subject focuses on religious as opposed to non-religious thought contents.
The conclusion for my work is quite straightforward: we have no justification at all, and indeed much evidence to the contrary, that all beliefs share the same cognitive structure. But if this is true, then the entire justification for the attack on all religious beliefs as if they were co-responsible for the evils of fundamentalism (a core point of agreement among the new atheists) simply vanishes. As I argue in An Uncertain Faith, it may well be that various forms of non-fundamentalist or moderate religious belief are far more antagonistic to fundamentalist thinking than all the bombast and aggression the new atheists can muster.
This would be a whole lot more convincing if you actually said what this alternate cognitive model of belief might consist of. If belief is not believing some proposition about what is true about the world, then what is it? What does an alternate cognitive structure for a belief even look like?
The example of Catholics not following the Church's teachings isn't all that relevant to the question of whether there is an alternate cognitive structure to belief, since these people might simply believe something else rather believing the same thing differently. You fudge the point in the phrase "the way believers believe..." In other words, you don't consider the possibility that moderates and fundamentalists simply hold different sets of propositions.
The argument that moderates provide cover and respectability for more radical forms of belief still seems solid to me, and your cognitive argument does not really address it. After all, it could be true that moderates believe differently at the neurological level, but still provide this kind of "cover" in sociological terms.
I was raised in the Episcopalian church, which is socially moderate and theologically liberal (apart from some splittists who've been in the news lately), and yet liturgically creedal -- we stood every Sunday and recited the Apostles' or Nicene Creed, plain statements of the sort of belief Harris can't wrap his head around. Eventually I couldn't handle the dissonance either, and left. Assuming my coreligionists weren't uniformly insincere, they must have been believing these things in a special way. And yet I don't remember such a way being articulated. If you can, I'd be interested to hear it....
It seems to be the case that one sense of the word “belief” is to hold a certain proposition to be true. But the nature of belief is much more complicated than that, as the philosopher Wittgenstein has shown in his book “On Certainty.” He argues that we are born into a culture in which an entire system of “beliefs” is given to us—that the world is round, that viruses cause diseases, that torturing a child is wrong, that people don’t have sawdust in their heads etc. We seem to hold an uncountable multitude of beliefs. Moroeover, Wittgenstein held that we only usually doubt against a background of held beliefs, when something doesn’t jibe with what we already hold to be true. For many of these “inherited” beliefs we have no evidence at all. We are simply taught them. But if Wittgenstein is correct, some things we call a “beliefs”—the earth revolves around the sun, viruses cause diseases, heads are not filled with sawdust--are also a matter of knowledge. If we know something and we are asked if we believe it, the common sense answer is “yes”. So one of the questions we would have to answer neurologically is whether the brain activity is similar when we think we know something (believe “the earth revolves around the sun”) and when we say that we believe that we will exist in some form after our death. If a child was taught both of these propositions would there be the same brain activity? How did Harris sort this out? It also seem possible that we have propositional attitudes that look like beliefs but that we might not even be able to express clearly what we believe in the form of propositions. I might say that I believe gravity is a strong force in the universe but as a layperson cannot explain clearly what gravity means or how it operates. All these complex issues need to be sorted out