no, personal gain is not the main point

Soon after finishing the previous post, I found myself easily anticipating one of the reactions it could provoke. Clearly I'm able to slide right into that well-worn supernatural mindset like a pair of old loafers. The reaction I imagine comes out sounding like, "Pfft. I can see what happened to you. You think that you became disillusioned, but you really were discouraged. You weren't showered with blessings and floating on a cloud, so then you retaliated by throwing your arms up and storming out. God didn't march to the beat of your drum. The cost of living a virtuous life wasn't adequately paying off, so you cut your losses. Mysterious doctrines weren't presented to you in an obvious manner that you could test through experiments. What a shame that religion wasn't simple and easy enough to fit your egocentric demands."

This reaction shows something about how religious followers approach belief: it's a matter of character  not analysis (in fact, they may advise someone to stop thinking so hard and "choose to just believe"). They're eager to shift blame from the content of the belief to the vices of the unbeliever. They're content to assume that personal gain drives people to dismiss their beliefs. 

Moreover, the flaw of greediness fits their ingrained preconceptions about everybody outside their group. Of course, they say to themselves, it's only natural for someone who's not living by the light of truth to view beliefs as a means instead of an end. Reasoning too much about the beliefs' outcomes is nothing more than fixating on what someone can get by having the beliefs. It indicates that someone is on the wrong track entirely. That's the secret of how anyone who once said they believed could go on to fail to be convinced by the beliefs' accuracy.

Unfortunately, in addition to oddly shaming the de-converted for the error of taking their beliefs' claims too seriously, this reaction misses the main point. The aim of contrasting the list of grandiose claims to the claims' tight restrictions isn't to whine about how little the claims amount to in practical terms. It's to thoroughly establish the pattern of the restrictions: each one is verrrrrrrry similar to the kinds of restrictions that would be necessary for beliefs that spring out of cognitive biases and communal/ritual reinforcement. True, the restricted claims are still about overlaps between reality and the supernatural realm...but the overlaps are so curiously subtle that someone might reasonably suppose that the overlaps aren't there at all. Or the overlaps are dependent on the lenient mindset of the believer or on the thoughts and actions of other people who conform to the beliefs—thereby making the beliefs real through human rather than divine intervention. 

The actual observed fulfillments of the amazing claims fall short because they don't provide objective signs of the supernatural, not because they're minor ("thank you for a close parking space, ruler of the cosmos"). A supernatural realm of wondrous claims that merely touches ordinary life in ordinary ways is hard to distinguish from, well, ordinary religions that have been created by humanity for millennia. Some have placed greater emphasis on what the religion supposedly does for you, and some have placed greater emphasis on what you must do without expecting a lot in return. Neither strategy successfully stands up to scrutiny.

restrictions may apply to 15 claims

Every once in a while I'm abruptly reminded—accidentally—of the vast differences between my materialistic naturalism and the supernatural beliefs followed by many people I know...and by me too in the past. Of course, the size of this gulf doesn't imply that I crossed it with one stupendous leap. My long journey was a sequence of one small step after another. The change was so gradual that at the end it took some additional self-evaluation to simply realize where I'd come to.

It's rare for most religious followers to closely examine us de-converted people (and listen to what we plainly say). They're much more apt to think of total outsiders as their opponents. As they see it, their beliefs are unbeatable. Anyone with a thorough understanding would be convinced. Logically then, in the case of anyone who isn't convinced, the conclusion is that their understanding is faulty or incomplete. Total outsiders are opposed because they don't grasp the full truth and the whole story. They would be followers too if only the message were communicated in the right terms and then they surrendered to its charms. 

Just by existing, de-converted insiders derail this line of reasoning. We decline to follow the beliefs that we were regularly taught for years and years. We not only learned but practiced the beliefs within a community, so our view is neither second-hand nor shallow. We were committed, yet we dropped that commitment after it didn't survive further consideration and self-honesty. Greater familiarity wasn't enough to keep us content. It contributed to our ultimate disbelief! We saw up-close that restrictions may apply to the numerous claims that we heard (sometimes via artistic forms). A brisk and incomplete list of the restrictions will emphasize that, while no single restriction to a claim could be convincing enough to overturn someone's core mentality, the sheer number piles up too high to be ignored forever. 

• Claim: God will never abandon you. Restriction may apply: Not only may you never see any concrete sign that God continues to be a personal companion of yours, there may not have been any concrete sign that it ever was.
• Claim: Make bold petitions to God and whatever you ask will be given to you. Restriction may apply: Your request might be ridiculous or premature, so it will be rejected for good reason. Or it might not fit into the grand unknown plan of the universe; after all, every mortal has "their proper time" to succumb to death. No matter what, you'll be left guessing about what God's reaction to the request actually was.  
• Claim: Your beliefs will give you joy in the midst of life's troubles. Restriction may apply: For the joy to reliably trigger, you might need to spend an extended time training your brain to reflexively obsess about an almighty being, whose smile you can't see, or perhaps the reward of an afterlife, which you cannot see for yourself beforehand.
• Claim: Jesus was an idealized version of you. Restriction may apply: Anyone who lived at that time and place, and raised in a highly different culture, didn't significantly resemble you in behavior, appearance, or general outlook.
• Claim: God's activity in human affairs will be obvious to you. Restriction may apply: Seeing God's caring intervention everywhere you look will depend on the mental lens that you view events through. By approaching every situation with high expectations, the smallest clue that might be construed as God's fingerprint can be magnified into solid evidence.
• Claim: God will heal the sick. Restriction may apply: Sicknesses that are vulnerable to skilled physicians will be healed by their hard work. Of course, God can still have been assumed to play an unseen role in that...somehow.   
• Claim: God controls everything. Restriction may apply: Tragedies with no apparent meaningfulness will happen. Societies will be governed by oppressors. Religious organizations will be led by people who can be motivated in petty ways. 
• Claim: There is one set of religious beliefs that's genuine. Restriction may apply: Religious beliefs have multiplied into a bewildering variety of sets, and subsets, and subsets of subsets. Each one contains one or more details in contradiction with the others and there's no objective method to decide among the group.
• Claim: The single firm foundation for ethics is the unchanging commands of God. Restriction may apply: The moral stances of the commands might seem outdated. Specific examples might require contorted interpretations that attempt to explain the intended moral for the modern age. Alternatively, the multiple commands might be exchanged for the simplistic sentiment, "Maybe just try caring about someone else for a change, huh? If you do that then feel free to pretend these other commands are unimportant relics and make up the rest for yourself. Always let your conscience by your guide."
• Claim: Every wrongdoing is forgivable thanks to the unearned mercy of God. Restriction may apply: Forgiveness is granted through the arduous task of being a bona fide follower, rather than a mere pretender who parrots the right words. This task demands the giving of time, money, and effort. Sincerity is a prerequisite. Obedience is not sufficient; you must love your spirit lord.   
• Claim: God will provide inner strength to do right instead of wrong. Restriction may apply: Inner strength is something you must laboriously cultivate by thinking regretfully about your past evil actions (confessing helps with that), growing accustomed to strictly policing your spontaneous thoughts, and choosing a new duller lifestyle that prevents common temptations. As with followers of any ideology, the human flair for compartmentalization might lead to the outcome that someone has extreme inner strength for some repulsive evils and yet they have zero resistance to their favorite evils.
• Claim: Official religious documents are accurate and as trustworthy as God. Restriction may apply: Careful and impartial investigation of the universe might appear to strongly disagree with official religious documents. The disagreement can be overlooked as long as the corresponding parts of the documents are classified as metaphorical and poetic. Fortunately, if the documents descended from legends, the original writers probably would've readily admitted that they couldn't know for sure whether the legends had been embellished in countless retellings. In addition, the original decision to decide what documents became official might have been a difficult struggle between competing followers, some of whom would've said that the documents that didn't become official were more accurate.  
• Claim: Divine guidance will be provided when someone earnestly seeks it. Restriction may apply: The process of seeking might be a demanding one of prolonged prayer sessions and fasting. The guidance received might be minimal or a nonverbal feeling of "peace" about a tricky decision. Experienced followers will warn that divine guidance should be compared with other sources such as the aforementioned official religious documents, or someone's peers and authorities. As with every claim, the fulfillment of it might come from one or more people who are being moved around like uninformed pawns on God's massive four-dimensional chessboard.
  
• Claim: God's presence is sensed directly during times of mass singing or praying or times of quiet contemplative solitude. Restriction may apply: The ease of sensing God's presence might vary depending on the follower's imagination, suggestibility, personality, mood, skill of visualization, and the level of distraction in their environment. It might be necessary to brush aside the fact that people can enter similar emotional states in nonreligious circumstances. Consistently getting the best results might require associating the psychological state to symbolic external cues, in the manner that Pavlov documented.
• Claim: The part of people that provides a sense of identity and makes decisions is a nonphysical soul that persists after the body stops functioning. Restriction may apply: No satisfying answer will be offered to the classic philosophical question of how to strictly define the boundaries and interactions between the nonphysical and physical domains. Meanwhile, experts of all areas except theology manage perfectly well without the concept of a soul. (A more interesting tactic would be to reject this claim and argue the doctrine that the whole bodies of the faithful dead will be resurrected/restored prior to entering heaven in the unspecified future.)

I'm aware that none of this is revolutionary news. And it's most clearly applicable to my former culture of typical U. S. evangelical Protestantism, a religious category that's losing relevance daily through its own efforts (albeit not without the political equivalent of a kicking and screaming tantrum). Nevertheless, I have faith in the worthwhileness of a passing reminder about exactly why the "sales pitch" wore thin for many of us and still occasionally grates on us now.