Thank you for an interesting essay. It is contrarian in a way, but I think it demonstrates more than anything else the hold that contemporary culture has on people’s minds. Consistently with that culture, you do not distinguish clearly between beliefs and knowledge.
Beliefs are a form of knowledge. They are extra-rational knowledge. As such, all beliefs actually are inherently valid for the believer. What believers fail to realize is that there is no valid reason for their beliefs to mean anything to anyone else.
Yet, combined with, as you point out, the place of beliefs in our sense of being, arguments based on beliefs become ‘contests of power’ (from Foucault) in which one feels one must prevail or suffer existential defeat. That accounts for the nature of wars based on religion — and ideology.
A big reason we why have confused beliefs and knowledge is that ideologies have been considered to be — by both Moderns and post-Moderns — rationalistic. They are not. Ideologies are secular religions, based on secular beliefs. Those beliefs are no more rationally ‘provable’ than any spiritual beliefs are.
Knowledge is different. It truly is rationalistic. Its focus is on understanding the world as we experience it (to include understanding humans as beings that are a part of that existence). Some of that knowledge stands the test of time; much of it does not.
I have written a great deal about rationality (including here in Medium), but for present purposes the essential difference is this: ‘knowledge’ is all about using our rational capacity to seek understanding of material existence; ‘beliefs’ are all about going outside our rational capacity to be absolutely certain, no matter what — then, in most cases (and always, with ideology), to seek to impose those beliefs within material existence.
As for ‘values’, I’ve found that rationality does yield an ethic of justice , a rule to govern human conduct involving other humans. I therefore call it ‘real justice’. It involves mutual respect (which also follows from a belief in human equality). If curious, it is summarized in a “5 min read”’ here in Medium.