[I coulda written this. I shoulda written this. But I didn't. And evanstonjew did.]
Many people of all religions believe in believing. They want to adopt a religious attitude towards life, not because such and such dogma is true, but because they just want to. It is a desire that cries out for satisfaction like all other desires; not all people, only some people and not necessarily all the time.
This is happening everywhere in the world. Why are Muslim girls putting on scarves? Because they believe in hadath min hashamayim? No...they seek a spirituality, and they give expression to this desire by inscribing it on their bodies.
My intuition is that behind all the bluster many of us at least some of the time want to believe, not believe some propositional content, and not just believe in the evolutionary or utilitarian value of emuna, which is considerable and hardly ever discussed, but simply want to be frum...daven bekavanah, learn as we did when we were in yeshiva, walk in the world with a frum consciousness.
Some people simply have a desire to return to the enchanted world of religion, and in our case Orthodoxy.
This active nekudah in some Jews is in my opinion a good thing, everything else being equal, i.e. it doesn't end in fanaticism, remains progressive and decent in politics and human relations, etc.
As usual propositional truth, dogmas are irrelevant to the cultivation of this feeling.
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