My admittedly very cynical point of view is to assume that, to a first-order approximation, most people don't have beliefs in the sense that LW uses the word. People just say words, mostly words that they've heard people they like say. You should be careful not to ascribe too much meaning to the words most people say.
In general, I think it's a mistake to view other people through an epistemic filter. View them through an instrumental filter instead: don't ask "what do these people believe?" but "what do these people do?" The first question might lead you to conclude that religious people are dumb. The second question might lead you to explore the various instrumental ways in which religious communities are winning relative to atheist communities, e.g. strong communal support networks, a large cached database of convenient heuristics for dealing with life situations, etc.
don't ask "what do these people believe?" but "what do these people do?"
If there was a way to send a message to my 10 years ago former self, and I could only send a hundred of characters, that's what I would send.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.