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?
I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.
A man whose life has been dishonourable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death.
Is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?
Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
For every child that is born, it brings with it the hope that God is not yet disappointed with man.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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