I honestly thought everyone was faking it, like Santa Claus, for almost the entire time I was at Sunday School (a fair few years as a kid). It was a shock to me that adults, people who were in charge of my world, actually believed. I couldn't have been more than 8/9, and for some reason someone was driving my brother and I home from somewhere, and she started encouraging us to pray that we'd have enough petrol to get home, but she didn't pull into a petrol station. I just remember having a really sense of shock that she thought it would work, because that's not how cars function.
After that I made it my business to find out what this God stuff was all about, and realised that it didn't make as much sense, nor preach as much love and joy, as the church had been teaching us.

Too damned many.
Cowards.

i think it's significant. the most obvious & nauseating are some of the leaders who would go to church on sun & then on mon order an attack on a supposed terrorist knowing that there would be many innocent civilians killed. they were the real despicable bastards & some of them occupied the white house.

In the Jehovah's Witnesses, it's a way of life and not just a religion. Everything - family, work, friends is bound up in the faith so if you have any doubts, you are under real pressure to fake it.

If someone is just going along, to get along, and that's a commonplace human way of dealing with life... is that "faking it"?

I think almost all of them fake it to some extent. It's almost like a contest for them to be holier-than-thou, or most "persecuted". However, I suspect that a significant portion of Congress are agnostic or atheist. Given their level of education and generally higher than average intelligence, it is probably a statistical certainty that the ratio of nonbelievers to believers is higher in Congress.

That is an interesting question and I am inclined to think that it is not so much a matter of fitting in but more a matter of belonging to some group. I think it was the late Dr Thomas Szasz who said: "In most people the desire to belong is greater than the desire to understand, hence the popularity of religions and cults and the lack of the role of reason in human affairs".

I’ve given it very little thought.