Most religious people don't think all that much about religion or the tenets of their faith one way or another (if they did, many would re-evaluate); most are drawn to their religious affiliation because of habit or tradition or because of some warm, fuzzy association that goes deeper than religion, just as the idea of Santa Claus and flying reindeer, patently absurd to adults, are viscerally entwined with pleasant associations from childhood that of course have nothing to do with the literal truth of those childhood stories.
The difference between Santa Claus and adult religious stories is that no one was ever burned alive or broken on the wheel for saying he thought Dad dressed up as Santa or that there were 11 reindeer (or 10 or none). It is considered neither impolite nor radical to admit (adult to adult) that the idea of Santa Claus is a deception created by parents to outsource their authority a bit ("he knows when you've been sleeping") and to create a warm and fuzzy and personalized pseudo-deity (he brings you presents in the end). We grow out of this idea but many do not grow beyond a man-in-the-sky belief in a personal deity who will respond to them if they address him (and it's usually a him) in the right way. We really don't know if dead people flew out of their graves and appeared in a flash of light to certain people who died thousands of years ago, then never appeared again (with the exception of an occasional grilled cheese sandwich) to anyone else, but the overwhelming weight of evidence is that they probably didn't.
The simple observation that people were burned alive for saying what I just did provides strong additional evidence that it is probably not true: testimony literally obtained through torture or the threat of torture is inherently unreliable.
If one tenet of a belief system is that questioning that belief system is itself offensive, then this faith must be fragile. The more a dogma deviates from reality, the greater the fragility. If we believe that we must tell our children things we ourselves do not believe in order for those beliefs to be propagated, it does not say much about the endurance or validity of those beliefs, does it? I don't have to worry that my children will doubt what I teach them about the laws of gravity: their own visceral experiences, enhanced by a thousand scrapes and bumps over the years, will allow the truth of the world around them to develop and be reinforced.
There are no natural phenomena important to our survival that do not have strong biological analogues - we don't need to tell adolescents about sexuality for them to be interested in it, nor do we need to convince a newborn, hungry baby to suck and swallow milk, nor do we need to convince someone who is cold to move toward the warmth. Our central nervous systems are wired to guide us through a sometimes hazardous world to not only survive, but to thrive and reproduce.
Religious fundamentalists want us to believe that for what they see as the most important task of all - recognizing and worshiping a particular deity - our senses are next to useless, that only through the reading, studying, and meditating upon ancient sacred texts (and only their valid sacred texts, not the fraudulent or even evil sacred texts of all other faiths) can we connect to this deity who remains so conspicuously and cruelly invisible (I say cruelly, because what father would let his children murder themselves in his name without stepping in and breaking it up? God could have ended the Thirty Years War or the Holocaust or prevented 9-11 but he either chose not to or does not exist, at least in the form fundamentalists insist we must believe).
Most things that are true are cross-culturally robust. Gravity is called different things by different cultures, but there isn't a place in the world that you can step off a 1,000' cliff and survive. We don't need a sacred text to tell us to fear heights or be careful walking along a high path. So the burden of proof remains why an all-powerful, all-knowing deity would outsource the job of advertising his presence to some guy handing out flyers in a Walmart parking lot.
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