A lot of religious people don't take their beliefs literally. It's more stories that they know are just stories (or just don't care if they're literally true or not), but that illustrate some important point and provide a shared context for talking about it.

Like how it doesn't matter if the "640k should be enough for anybody" quote is actually true or not, or Paul Bunyan and John Henry and the rest of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion , or the Story of Mel the Real Programmer, or the 500 mile email, etc. They illustrate important principles and shared cultural values, and strict historical accuracy isn't actually that important to their usefulness.

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hold more complex thoughts than simple prejudices.

The annoying thing about prejudices, is they're often not so much flat wrong as deliberately under-fitting the data for performance reasons or bootstrapping a model for a new environment with data from an old environment. For example, there's a lovely article about how affirmative action quotas encourage racism here: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-prop... .