An Exercise in Logic and Proof

My wife is more religious than I am. Not to the point where she recoils and hisses like a vampire when confronted by something erotic, for example, but she generally goes along with the whole idea of a God and a Christian denomination's ideas of truth.

I, on the other hand, don't.

In our very rare conversations about religion she had said of me that (to paraphrase) no matter what evidence she presented, I'd have an excuse not to believe it, so it does no good to discuss it.

I on the other hand see it as arguing over something that has no foundation on which to believe, and that the idea of me having an excuse not to believe the reasons I'm presented with are actually nothing more than turning the tables on the other person's inability to present such reasonable proof. What am I talking about? This excellent essay by Carl Sagan explains it quite clearly. She accused me of always having an excuse...I say it's the other way around. The essay is very short and lays out the issue in a simple manner.

I realize this isn't going to make any difference; people will believe what they want to believe and they'll always find a reason to cling to those beliefs. What it came down to for me was whether I could accept living with ideas that I had concluded were not supported, essentially living a lie. If I couldn't reconcile the ideas presented to me from the Christian religion...or any other religion...with the voice of reason in my head and experiences in life, then I simply cannot bring myself to follow the belief system imposed by those religions.