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Okay...I'm trying this again. I'm going to pick on Christians a lot...but that's just because I have the most examples of them. Sorry. You are the dartboards everyone throws darts at whenever we are irritated at anything anyone of any religion has done in the last 3,000 years.
Information I'm pretty certain is true:
Most people cannot believe their religious beliefs in the same way they believe that the earth is round. If they did their behavior would be vastly different than their behavior currently is.
How would their behavior be different if they believed in their religions in the same way they believe Earth is flat? Imagine if every time someone ceased being a Christian everyone saw them experience a slow death from drug abuse. They would see it and they would therefore believe it just as much as they believe Earth is flat. How long would it take for non-Christian religions to become illegal and for the vast majority of Christians to devote enormous amounts of time to developing strategies for seeking converts?
Therefore, what are some potential explanations for the behavior we see?
1. Perhaps most people's self-described belief in their religion actually consists of the view that their religion is less than 50% likely to be true. I could understand it being difficult to know whether you believe a religion is 80% likely to exist, or 20% likely to exist. I am frequently biased by my worries and hopes so I assume others are too. That could skew my perceptions about what I actually believe if I want to believe something enough. A widespread belief that nonbelievers are 20% likely to die of drug abuse deaths seems like certainly something that the holders of such beliefs would be concerned about, but maybe not enough to become outraged at and sack the government and replace it with a theocracy. This belief that a Christianity with hell for nonbelief is only 20% likely to be true, or less, or maybe a little more, seems like it would better explain modern behavior of most Christians than the majority of Christians holding the view that a hell for nonbelievers is over 50% likely to exist would.
The problem with that is that neither Christians nor people of other religions seem to say things like "I think there is a one in five chance of Christianity being true, but I'm going to try to believe because it's safest according to Pascal's Wager." I'd assume some people wouldn't trick themselves into thinking a god is likely to exist when they're actually just concerned about the possibility of its existence. If they're out there, where are they, particularly if they're the majority?
2. Maybe most people feel that they need to just accept that much of the world is beyond their control and they won't be able to save everyone.
This doesn't make sense to me. This could explain why they're not too concerned about strangers, but not people close to them. If nonbelief means your five year old nephew experiencing a drug-related death, you're probably going to be quite protective and be unwilling to leave things up to fate.
3. Maybe there is a simple lack of thought resulting in the behavior we see.
This does make sense to me. There is no wondering about how best to save humanity for much the same reason why when someone asks you to imagine a pirate, there will probably be aspects of the pirate you've left out of your mental image. Sometimes people just don't think about things.
Possibility 3 seems like the most likely possibility to me, and if that is the primary reason why we don't see most people in the U.S. attempting to create a theocracy despite most of the nation being Christian...we could organize how little someone thinks about their religions with a scale. On the lower end of the scale would be the people with who, regardless of how likely they believe a god's existence to be, don't think about it much. On the higher end of the scale would be the people who, regardless of how likely they think a god's existence is, think about their religions a lot.
It would not replace Dawkins Spectrum of Theistic Probability which defines people based on how likely they believe a god is to exist. It would be an additional way for people to classify themselves.
On the lowest level regardless of whether or not someone thinks there is a 90% chance of the Christian god's existence, he or she may not think about it enough to make that belief seem real enough affect their lives much more than reading a science fiction book. On the highest level, even if someone thinks there is only a 10% chance of god's existence or Christianity being true or whatever, he or she thinks about it so much that he or she has prepared for the religion being true just as much as if he or she were preparing for a tornado or a hurricane.
Make any more sense than the last one? Clear as mud?
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