The problem with religious beliefs is not that they are false (they don’t have to be), but that they are believed for the purpose of signaling belonging to a group, rather than because they are true. This does cause them to often be wrong or not even wrong, but the wrongness is not the problem, epistemic practices that lead to them are. Correspondingly, the reasons for a given religious belief turning out to be wrong are a different kind of story from the reasons for a given factual belief turning out to be wrong. The comparison of factual mistakes in religious beliefs and factual mistakes made by people who try to figure things out is a shallow analogy that glosses over the substance of the processes.
The problem with religious beliefs is not that they are false (they don’t have to be), but that they are believed for the purpose of signaling belonging to a group, rather than because they are true. This does cause them to often be wrong or not even wrong, but the wrongness is not the problem, epistemic practices that lead to them are. Correspondingly, the reasons for a given religious belief turning out to be wrong are a different kind of story from the reasons for a given factual belief turning out to be wrong. The comparison of factual mistakes in religious beliefs and factual mistakes made by people who try to figure things out is a shallow analogy that glosses over the substance of the processes.