In my experience, many Americans think of religion as important and want to do whatever they can to support it. But if you ask them what they themselves believe, you'll find they're very uncertain about their religious beliefs. They don't actually accept the theology of their official church.
Interpretation
The quote highlights a common disconnect between the value people place on religion and their personal beliefs.
Steven Weinberg's quote reflects on the complexity of religious belief among Americans, suggesting that while many regard religion as significant, there exists a prevalent uncertainty about personal convictions. This implies that adherence to organized religion may not always align with individual understanding or acceptance of its teachings, pointing to a deeper philosophical inquiry about faith, belief, and societal norms.
In practice
In a discussion about faith and personal beliefs, this quote can serve to illustrate the complex relationship people have with organized religion.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.
My way of putting it is that Christians are called to live nonviolently not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but in a world of war as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent.
But I have to add - and this answers your other question - this catholicity in time and in space is only meaningful for me if there is, at the same time, a concentration on the Gospel.
He appeared before me and departed. We were not able to speak to or touch each other. But in that short interval, he transformed many things inside me. He literally stirred my mind and body the way a spoon stirs a cup of cocoa, down to the depths of my internal organs and my womb.
Let's worship Divinity, but understand the divinity we worship is beyond our comprehension.
Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
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