It didn’t start out that way. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry posted the following:

To have a religion is to hold a belief about metaphysics. Either you believe that Allah is God and Muhammad is his Prophet or you don’t. If you do, and you eat pork, this will not make Muhammad more, or less, the Prophet. The two things aren’t related.

He was questioning the relationship between religious belief and “action,” specifically the question “why do you, as an X (say Christian), do Y?”

Noah Millman responded with the provocatively titled post, “When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

Millman points out the priority, for most of the world’s religions of “orthopraxy” over “orthodoxy;” that is to say one’s actions, especially ritual actions are what make one a Hindu, or Jew, to take two examples.

In Gobry’s response, he says:

But here’s the thing: the subtext to this entire debate is really the question: “Does (my particular) religious belief make people a better people?” “And if so, to what extent, and how, and why?”

To the first question, my answer is a resounding yes.