How do people maintain religious faith in the face of so many contradictory claims and ideas -- not just after being faced with secular critiques of religion, but in the face of so many contradictory religions and sects? Well, an important factor is the isolation of a person from the contradictory information. In the past the isolation could be literal because cultures tended to be so homogenous; today that isn't as easy to achieve so the isolation must be enforced more deliberately and consciously.
The isolationist strategy is to limit sources of corroboration or critical control to those who share one's views. The faithful cannot take seriously as challenges whether or not randomly selected physicists or biologists will allow that a person can literally walk on water, a woman can have a virgin birth, the dead can be alive.
Respected historians are not to be relied on to determine the origins of religious texts and their stories. Authority on these matters does not rest with experts on the subjects, but with priests and ministers with prior commitments to the veracity of these texts and stories.
Isolationism by a group shrinks the set of acceptable ideas or beliefs, homogenizing the range of thought. As a group becomes more insular, dissent, beyond very restricted bounds, is treated as disloyalty, to be eliminated. Yet, social scientists teach us that in the absence of dissent groups tend to polarize, a crucial step toward extremism.
Source: "Faith and Fanaticism," by Jonathan E. Adler in Philosophers Without Gods
The implications here are that religion almost necessarily and inherently tends towards extremism. Insofar as religion requires isolation, it will also encourage insularity and polarization. How can it not? Of course, religion isn't the only type of system that can do this or has ever done this. Many secular ideologies have done it as well. The question is: do secular ideologies need to do this? No, I don't think so.
Do religions need to do this? Perhaps they don't necessarily need to, but it seems awfully more common with religions than with secular ideologies, doesn't it? Sometimes people do try to protect secular ideologies from outside competition, but that seems to be the exception rather than the norm. Isn't it the reverse with religions?
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