The Mind of the Believer

I'll tell you what, the more time I spend arguing with believers the more I become interested in psychology and how the brain works. It's not just the utter buffoons I'm talking about, which are many, but all of them. Christians are illogical and delusional. This I know, after spending years in my own delusion and after years of dealing with them since my deconversion. How can they be so deluded, I ask myself? How can they be so dumb? Recently a PhD sent me his criticisms of a part of my book, WIBA, so I began writing a response but abruptly stopped and deleted it, because it didn't deserve a response. I've heard it all before. And I've said it all before. I am convinced that defending the faith makes otherwise brilliant people look stupid. I mean it. That's what faith does to a person.

Last night there was a program on Dateline of a Canadian colonel named Russell Williams who lived an impeccable life as a military man, but at night he was a sexual predator. He lived two separate compartmentalized lives. Christians also live in two separate compartmentalized lives. In one life--their ordinary or working one--they live in reality by thinking for themselves, and following the evidence wherever it leads as best as they can. But in their other life--their life of faith, the one they were raised to believe, the one that gives them their needed false hope, the one they prefer to be true--they abandon reality, thinking, and evidence altogether.