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Christians, Muslims, and other religious people who believe extraordinary claims simply because they're written in holy books may not like to read this, but a religious hypocrite is a religious person, and a religious person is a hypocrite.

That's right. All religions - especially theistic ones, which make specific, literal claims about supernatural places and beings - are hypocritical, and that makes all religious people hypocrites.

Wait, what? That's quite an inflammatory claim. Let's delve in a little deeper.

First, what is a hypocrite? A hypocrite is someone who claims to have a belief, but then acts or speaks in ways that contradict that belief - ways uncharacteristic of people who hold the belief they do.

Now, what's a religion? That's a bit tougher. It's hard to categorize religions as different from cultures and philosophies, but they usually do contain elements of both. A religion is a system of beliefs about supernatural claims, often accompanied by sacred texts and stories.

Among other things, all religions have these three things in common: they make definite claims about the world, they call themselves the "only way" (with the exception, perhaps, of Buddhism), and they involve the unproven, that is, the supernatural. Supernatural claims are unverified and usually constructed to be unverifiable - if they were verified and verifiable, they wouldn't be supernatural, they would be naturalistic and scientific.

Religious people must ascribe to their religion's basic tenets, not necessarily perfectly, but mostly. For example, you can't be a Christian if you don't believe Jesus Christ was the son of god (rather than just a prophet), and you can't be a religious Jew if you don't believe in the Abrahamic god (rather than Shiva), and you can't be a Muslim if you think Allah is less than all-powerful (like .

All religious people believe something like this: something specific to their religions and antithetical to other religions, which is unverified, if not totally unverifiable.

If you believe that your religion is better than all other religions (which you must, if you're a member, or else you would join another one), you must also believe that people are unjustified in choosing other religions, especially since your religion itself surely says so. Outsiders would be best off, you believe, if they converted to your religion - the one "true" religion.

Yet, your religious affiliation is based on unverified, or unverifiable, supernatural claims. You can't prove, to

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