"Faith: Not Wanting to Know What is True"

Previously I had mentioned the new Counter Apologist Blog. It's a good one. I highly recommend another one by a former minister called Chasing Black Swans. His excellent definition of faith is the title to this post. What is the Black Swan Theory that it's based on? This:

Self-deception is the worst kind of error. To reverse our belief is as rare as finding a black swan. Of course, religious people think they have found the black swans of all black swans. They have found the one thing that breaks the rules as we know them, a god. This demands a blind faith, not empirical evidence. It is as best the conflating anecdotal connections that should create humility but somehow have created among the world's religions an unbending certainty. Enough certainty that 12 men would gladly fly airplanes into buildings for their faith. Enough certainty that ancient narratives are taken as scientific, historic and archaeological fact in spite of growing evidence to the contrary. Enough certainty that a rigid ideology is held as settled via magical and supernatural realities and used as political, cultural and personal discrimination. Chasing black swans is about a challenging those dogmas with a skepticism that seems reasonable in the face of such fantastical claims. LINK.

In a letter to Christians he writes:

It wasn’t until I was able, physically and mentally, to step outside my own belief system and evaluate it like I had evaluated every other faith claim that I stopped believing. I was already, by default, atheistic about all other gods. And I’m not just speaking about the ones that are called by different names with different religions, but also the many different versions of Yaweh and Jesus among Christians who disagree on major essentials. Religious people can always find someone to the right or the left of them calling them a heretic. Once I examined my beliefs historically, critically, and logically in the same manner I examined Mormonism, Jehovah Witnesses, Islam, Scientology, Buddhism, and all other faiths that claimed authority for the unseen, I simply added one more god to the list of unbelief. It so happened to be the Christian version of a god because of my culture and geography. LINK.

His well-written deconversion story can be found here.

He endorses my Outsider Test for Faith right here, by quoting it word for word from this post of mine.

Hey Christian defender, former believers like him were once believers just like you. Deny it. I know you will. But it's true, just as it's true of many of us. You might one day become like we are today, you never know.