In his long answer above @dalepetrie explains the persistence of faith through time but not why people like @Jferrato7 prefer to believe in things that are contrary to the facts, which I think is what the questioner is really asking.
I would hate to think that being grounded in reality was something subject to the Bell Curve as @dalepetrie seems to suggest. That implies reality-connectedness is a kind of psychological trait, like extroversion or optimism that one is either born with or lacks. It also implies that most people live in a haze of superstition and irrationality, shading off into delusion and psychosis at one end, and full rationality and deep insight into the (scientific) nature of reality at the other. This psychological view is actually quite pessimistic, insofar as there is nothing much you can do about the distribution of a psychological trait in a population.
An alternative view is that disconnectedness from reality is an abnormal state of affairs. More specifically it is a kind of cultural meme which infects the culture of the body politic much like a nasty virus. To be clear, I should emphasize that what I am talking about here is not the ordinary faith of the vast majority of believers, which is generally tempered by the humility of doubt, but the pathological faith of fundamentalist True Believers, who bypass the problem of doubt by jettisoning all human authority in favor of the authority of scripture. Accordingly, they embrace scripture as the ultimate arbiter of reality, and view any form of doubt as apostasy, backsliding, and sin.
This, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere. It has its origins in the Protestant Reformation. Specifically, it is a reaction to the Catholic Church’s abuse of the idea that one can gain access to heaven by doing good works—which the Church conveniently provided in the form of purchased indulgences. In breaking with this tradition, the Protestants proposed that Faith Alone was sufficient for salvation, and scripture became the touchstone of that belief. At one stroke, there was no longer a need for the Catholic confessional, which had fallen into disrepute for demanding that the faithful purchase indulgences as a penance. Unfortunately, without a confessional to expiate guilt, the Protestants became positively obsessed, to the point of hysteria, about sin and damnation.
To make matters worse, they became severe disciplinarians who beat their children from infancy onward in order to break their wills and reduce them to unquestioning obedience in order to prepare them for God’s wrathful judgment, which might arrive at any moment. This coupling of corporal punishment with theology has served to convince generations of Protestants that they personally, and human nature generally, was totally depraved, and therefore could only be ruled by fear, baked up by threat of punishment both in this world and the next.
This combination of child abuse, religious indoctrination, and cult-like insularity has been brewing in America’s Bible Belt for almost two centuries now. And, it has produced a kind of low-empathy, low self-esteem, humanity-despising, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, highly fearful and anxious individual who is almost uniquely susceptible to political and religious indoctrination—particularly to messages of the “us” versus “them” sort, which seem to divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys.”
The idea of scriptural inerrancy, while present since the 18th Century, did not really gain wide currency until the 20th Century in the evangelizing of Born Again Christians. Here, faith demands a renunciation of all forms of secular and humanist thought in favor of a conversion experience in which one literally turns oneself over, mind, body and soul to God. And, in this God-centered reality, anything that contradicts the authority of scripture must be cast out as “against God” and therefore “evil.” Sadly, rationality and human empathy have to be avoided under threat of eternal damnation.
As a consequence, the intellects of True Believers tend to become compromised. They literally can not reason like the rest of us because to do so because secular reality severely threatens the authority of scripture, upon which their whole God-centered reality rests. In this respect, the Born Again conversion experience literally unhinges them from the reality that the rest of us live in and consigns them to a rigid but brittle belief system from which it is difficult to recover (although some people do).
Unfortunately, once immunized to reason and fact-based reality testing in the religious domain, why should reason and fact-based reality testing apply in the political domain? Thus, the Religious Right is also now the loony fringe of the political Right, and we see these folks featured prominently in the national dialogue. And what we are seeing now is a drumming up of apocalyptic fervor in anticipation of an End-of-Days final conflict between Good and Evil. The increasingly violent rhetoric of the Right—the town hall disruptions, people taking guns to protest rallies, the killing of abortion doctors, the steady drumbeat of “birthers” and “deathers” in an attempt to delegitimate Obama are all stoked by the sense that an apocalyptic war between Good and Evil are building to a head.
The inarticulate rage of the teabaggers is only inarticulate because the movement dares not articulate what they are really all about—which is a contempt for the democratic process, which has pushed them out of power; a sense of betrayal among whites that their county has been taken over by non-whites and Others; throw in a bit of anxiety that bad economic times always brings, and the agitprop disseminated by Fox News and the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck (featured here as a self-styled German propaganda minister ) and you have an incipient fascist movement centered on Christianity.
I am using the term fascism here advisedly, and not as most people us it simply as a brush to tar people that I disapprove of. There are 14 defining criteria of fascism, and the American Right is clearly tilting very strongly in that direction. This would not be possible were it not that so many Americans have been so intellectually compromised that they tend to think almost entirely in terms of cliches and catch phrases.
As Frank Schaeffer was saying the other night on the Rachel Maddow show, it is as if we have allowed the village idiot to hijack the national dialogue. The more we take them seriously, the more our nation’s policies get led astray. Those who wonder why we have so many questions about religion on Fluther and elsewhere, it is because we are trying to extricate ourselves from this national hangover. We are in the process of trying to make up our minds what to do with these folks. Take them seriously, or ignore them. And if we ignore them, how do we do so? With ridicule and scorn? Or with some measure of Christian understanding and compassion? And how do we pull that off? How do we extricate them from the national conversation without humiliating them and driving them further into their unreality, where they may emerge even more virulent than before.
We take the loyalty of the armed services for granted. But there is a very strong Dominionist presence in the US Air Force. If there were an actual right-led rebellion, and these folks got hold of a few nukes, or even a stock of conventional weapons, we could all be living under a theocratic regime that would make Sharia law look positively lenient. If crashing a couple of airliners into a couple of skyscrapers can plunge the whole country into panic and recession, imagine what a determined Armageddon-bound group of fanatics could accomplish if they got a hold of a number of predator drones.
I don’t think we can afford to be complacent in the face of militant True Believers, so onward with the religious debates until we can figure out how best to deal with our village idiot bretheren.
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