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Frankly, I think your general assertions about religion and religious people are nonsense. Billions of human beings are religious. They're of all kinds. I'm a pretty traditional Christian myself — not a young-Earth-creationist Biblical literalist by any means, but a pretty average Anglican. I don't believe I fit the pattern you describe, and I don't believe I'm so unusual. In particular, my experience from knowing a lot of religious people quite well is that their beliefs about objectively tangible things are not really very relevant to them. Not infrequently they believe silly things about the actual world, or have poor understandings of their own faith's actual doctrines, because those things really don't matter that much in most people's lives. It's the outwardly intangible but inwardly real and important things, like courage versus depression or risk versus security, that make up most of people's religious experience.
Except in the literal sense of 'physically touchable', 'tangible' is not itself an objective property. Free jazz aficionados can be really passionate about something that I just don't get at all, and a mathematician can talk for hours about stuff that means nothing at all to most people. To the insiders, the experiences that others miss completely can be very real.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tangible
Full Definition of TANGIBLE
1
a : capable of being perceived especially by the sense of touch : palpable
b : substantially real : material
2
: capable of being precisely identified or realized by the mind <her grief was tangible>
3
: capable of being appraised at an actual or approximate value <tangible assets>
— tan·gi·bil·i·ty noun
— tan·gi·ble·ness noun
— tan·gi·bly adverb
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Examples of TANGIBLE
There is no tangible evidence to support her claim.
Their sense of relief was almost tangible.
These days, an environmentally conscious motorist can walk into a Toyota or Honda dealer and snap up an efficient gasoline-electric hybrid, but the omega point of green driving—the pollution-free hydrogen fuel cell vehicle—is so elusive that one wonders if it will ever become tangible. —Brad Lemley, Discover, October 2002
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Origin of TANGIBLE
Late Latin tangibilis, from Latin tangere to touch
First Known Use: 1589
Related to TANGIBLE
Synonyms
palpable, touchable
Antonyms
impalpable, intangible
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See Synonym Discussion at perceptible