By Dano

I find myself with this compulsion to try to use logic and reason to try to convince people they are wrong about a certain thing, but what I am beginning to understand is that when it comes down to religious beliefs at least, rational, critical thought takes back a seat to emotion every time.

Now don't get the idea that I think I am the first one to have figured this out. On the contrary, I have read about "Cognitive dissonance" in all of the best selling books, written by the biggest names in Christian Apostasy.

One best selling female author and Psychologist who is also an ex Christian fundamentalist even explained it to me this way: Some time the smartest and most gifted are the very ones who can come up with the most complex and imaginative ways to hold on to their emotional beliefs in supernatural things.

You have seen them, those brilliant graduates of theology schools, who have gone on to become pastors, and teachers and spent their lives studying every Christian Apologetic book ever written, and come here to "Ex-Christian" to witness to us.

They usually start out by attempting to impress us with their piety but quickly digress to trying to impress us with their knowledge of how all of the various phrases, bits of ancient history, and passages from a myriad of texts, collected over a period of 5000 years, got to be canonized into the k J. V.

In other words they quickly dance away from answering our questions, about HOW THEY KNOW, all about what God wants, and what God says, and quickly divert our attention to endless debate, about which Bronze age contributor to the Bible, said what, and where and when, and in the end they usually start making up their versions as they go along.

Wouldn't it be nice if one of them would just say?

Yes, it appears that I'm trapped in a self replicating mind cult, and can't get out. Please help me get out and try to face life with courage and hope, and honesty.

After living for 71 years, most of which my analytical mind has rejected all things magical and supernatural, I don't know what answer I would give them other than ask:

Do you really want to help perpetuate a mythical belief that has been responsible for so much evil down through 2000 years of mans history? Do you really want to be associated with a belief that was forced upon so many men and women by the Pope and succeeding religious tyrants of other sects of Christianity? Think about those poor souls who were given the choice of professing a belief in it before they were strangled or dismembered on the rack, or boiled in oil.

I suggest we can find a nicer gentler philosophy for living. HELP ME THINK! I'm sure it can be proven that all of the good done in then name of Christianity can and would be done anyway if we gave up the idea that the only way we can be a good person is to have faith in an imaginary dead man.

Christianity and it's sister cult Islam have a history of inflicting such unspeakable suffering on so many of our brothers and sisters, that they don't deserve to be replicated any more, and passed to another generation. They need to go away just like all the Pagan blood sacrifice religions that spawned them. They are central in great bloodletting conflicts today that threaten to end life as we know it. The God of Abraham needs to be replaced by a more sensible God. One called common sense.

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