Why Believe in God?

It's my birthday so I thought I'd post something that was kind of personal. Unfortunately this tends to tick other people off. At least it does in real life if I were to bring it up. I learned a long time ago that religion and politics are two things that people would rather not rationally discuss so I avoid it and pretty much assume it's topica non-grata. I don't get much feedback from the blog on the topic, so I didn't think it would hurt that much to bring it up here. This is kind of an off-the-cuff rant (I think it's called stream of consciousness, or something similar to it) so if the lack of structure is something else that bothers you that's another reason to move on to another day's topic.

I don't believe in a god.

And I don't understand why other people do.

It's a copout to say that perhaps my atheism stems in part from my tendency to value reason over emotion, or the quirk where if I see an inconsistency in reasoning it is something I cannot unsee. I was raised as a methodist but from a very young age I simply couldn't accept Christianity as the answer to all the questions I had.

I have come to believe that people believe in gods because it is simple. If you don't understand it, God did it. And people who profess to believe in a neverending spirit living for eternity will blindly follow whatever religion they feel comfortable with...I don't see them thinking critically about this, they just do it. And it perplexes me. You're gambling on your eternal soul without critically evaluating your religion?

I think this is in part to how complicated things really are and how we're wired to handle complicated things.

People by default use stereotypes as a shortcut for evaluating situations. We assume the guy in a police uniform is a cop. He might be. He might not be. There are stories of women being pulled over by cars with dash lights and a man in a uniform who then proceed to rape them. There are numerous advice columns I've read that say if anything seems suspicious, you should proceed to a well-lit public area to pull over (indicating you are going to pull over and acknowledge the officer) or keep the door locked and window up and demand to see a badge and have them call for another officer to come as well.

We assume things about certain races, situations, uniformed people, and while not true, they often turn out to be somewhat accurate, or accurate enough that we can free our mental processing space for other tasks. People simply aren't willing to ask questions about the universe or take time to understand the scientific method. Unfortunately, our country (the US) is largely scientifically illiterate.

I have heard people say that there's no way for us to know about extrasolar planets (they don't use those terms, though). I don't pretend to know every detail. But I do know that there's multiple ways scientists have verified it. Even if I did, the person that says that probably wouldn't understand lensing, gravity's effects on light, how a large mass moving in front of a star affects the perception of the star from Earth over time, or even how the planetary object of sufficient mass affects light from a star when the object is behind the star. We can even get an idea of the makeup of the atmosphere with very sensitive light receptors and seeing what an analysis of the spectrum of light hitting Earth shows as the planet moves in front of the light source.

See, these are things that scientists cannot make up. they cannot on a whim declare that there's another planet out there. They are using methods and reasoning that can be duplicated by other people. And as of this writing there are over 370 extrasolar planets confirmed using these methods.

Intuitively I cannot follow the religious teachings I have been given. I ask questions and never get satisfactory answers that cannot be rephrased, basically, "Because I said so."

• Why did God create us?
• What does Satan get from an eternity of picking on God by playing with people?
• Wouldn't Satan have something better to do? Or God, for that matter?
• Why do you have faith in a book that has been retranslated many many times over a centuries and is still having some translations in dispute?
• Why should I believe the interpretation of the Bible from someone who may not even know that Jesus' native tongue wasn't English?
• How can the Bible preach love and understanding (which Jesus does, from the versions I have read) be used to justify hate crimes?
• Have you stopped to think about where all the water in the great flood came from, or where it went? (Into the Earth really isn't possible. Do some math to find out why.)
• If there were one small family on the ark, doesn't that mean that everyone on Earth now would be inbred?
• Where is historical evidence of Jesus outside the Bible?
• Why does God have His followers interpret (and according to each other, misinterpret) His word and intentions rather than just make a really big planetwide broadcast of His will?
• Why did God apparently spend a lot of time a couple thousand years ago performing astounding feats and personally interceding in disputes and society affairs, then disappear entirely?
• Why is the Catholic church currently banning sharing a chalice for ceremonies out of fear of H1N1, if they believe that God will protect them in their one true faith?
• Why is it that the Bible is held to be the sacred word of God, but there is still so much "wiggle room" for interpretation, or worse, followers cherry pick what they want or don't want and follow their own version of religion, still believing that everyone else is wrong?
• If God does not want certain behaviors, why does He allow for them to exist?
• If we are allowed to sin because of free will, why would he punish us with eternal pain and torment after spending our entirely lives playing "it was all a test" with my life?
• I hear people say "I have nothing to lose by believing in God and everything to gain." Wouldn't it suck to be a careful practicing Methodist to find out the Catholics were right all along? Take your pick...there's only a couple hundred possible religions to follow here.
• If the only thing getting me into Heaven is knowledge of Jesus, what happens to the mentally retarded, or those that are raised in a situation where they are never exposed to religion? Do they go to Hell because of ignorance?
• If ignorance is allowed...like babies who die young, the mentally retarded, etc...why are you condemning me to Hell by telling me about your religion?
• If we cannot possibly understand the nature of God or his will, at what level of understanding are we deemed fit to enter Heaven? On a scale of ignorance, I mean...
• If there was no physical union with Mary, was Jesus a clone? How could a male have conceived from the DNA material of a lone woman?
• If God loves me, why would he torture me when He won't come down and have a personal chat with me? He surely knows what it would take to have me believe in Him. He can create the universe but not spare ten minutes to say hello without some mediary showing up at my door spouting his interpretation of what He wants?
  

Those are just some of the questions I've had. I think they're legitimate. Other people think I'm apparently just being snarky. but after not having answers to these things for so long, I gave up listening.

Science doesn't know everything. But I've rarely encountered a rabid follower of a major religion who has tried to understand the nature of the conclusions of science. Their eyes glaze over and they start ignoring the evidence...they never understand that what science does explain cannot be simply written off as a miracle or pulled from a hat. And there are things that it explains that contradict what's in the Bible.

"Well, the stories are meant to guide us, they're not literally true," some say.

I'm pretty sure the Bible was meant to be taken at face value. Over time it has morphed into some morpheous blob that is okay to interpret when convenient for many people, probably to try to reconcile those things that contradict in the Bible and real life experiences while still using it as a handy mental putty for filling in gaps of intellectual knowledge or sense.

Besides, if you can interpret the stories as not really happening or being modified or changed over time, what can you believe as being true versus just stories? Why are parts something to gamble your soul on for eternity while other parts are just myths for illustrating points?

When I was younger I decided to follow religion based on the idea that if I were born in a village with no established religion, how would I know what to believe?

Surely a Christian God wouldn't only base his country club membership policy on who has read his book. Otherwise people who were innocent would suffer.

I look around and see a wonderous world of complicated machinations. And there may be a time where I would have thought of sky wizards creating balls of light, or stories to explain the stars.

But science analyzes how these things work. Based on evidence and sound theories (and there's a definition for the word theory as used in science that does NOT MEAN some untested idea I pulled out of my arse...otherwise you couldn't be able to take a course in college on music theory). Based on evidence science sets out to explain the natural world. We learned the nature of stars. We have math and simulations that explain fusion energy, spectral analysis to verify what our star is made of, and the math to predict how long the sun will last. We have dopplar shift to show how stars are moving away (or towards) our position in the universe.

That's the major difference between religion and science. What science establishes must be based on sound reasoning and logic. Religions can say the planet is held up on the backs of turtles, and if you ask where the turtles came from there is little more than dismissive hand waving.

I can't live with that.

Maybe others can. My priorities lay in finding or understanding truths. I may not get those answers in my lifetime, but I know there is a quest to find them. Religion settles for "good enough", with threats of torture if you question too much.

I wonder if other people are simply content with prioritizing comfort over knowing. It's easy to just say God did it. It's hard to understand fancy things like relativity.

I don't know and the more I think about it the more I think I'm wired to not understand why people do this. As long as it's not affecting me, that's okay. You can believe whatever you want. I only have a problem with it when religious folks start legislating their beliefs on me. I hate laws that make no rational sense or are inconsistent. I mean, sodomy laws? I don't care what you do in your home. As long as I don't have to participate and I don't have to deal with it and if others are involved they are doing so voluntarily, I don't have an issue with it. So why do you have to burden our already overburdened and archaic sets of laws with more idiotic paperwork?

In the end, science works. Religion...I've found no evidence of it. Science gives us microwave ovens, CD's, and cell phones with more computing power than the systems that put men on the moon. The same people that denounce the scientific evidence for evolution and all things contrary to their beliefs have no trouble driving cars with laser-welded frames and watching televisions getting images and data from plain old wires in the ground or satellites held up in the sky by more than magic.

In the end it doesn't matter. I'm one voice in the confusion and chaos and I'll eventually die having left little if any footprint in the world. I'm certainly not going to convert anyone into taking more of a reasonable approach to life or existence. But I will still vent on occasion in forums like this. For better or worse. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

It's probably time for me to go out and not have birthday cake...

God...didn't create the Earth?

Happy Halloween everyone! I thought I'd celebrate our favorite "evil pagan holiday" by ticking off some of the more pious out there in the blogosphere. This is actually older news from near the beginning of the month, but it was still an interesting read.

Here's the story.

Apparently some academic who studies the Old Testament...she's a scholar and all...is saying that the Bible was mistranslated.

In studying the original Hebrew text and given the proper context, she claims that the actual wording of "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" should actually be "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth".

In other words, God created animals and people and plants...life...but not the Earth. The Earth was already there.

Now I don't personally believe either of those for my own reasons. My take on this is that it won't make any difference whatsoever.

People believe what they want to believe. Unless you were forced to face a contradiction in such a way that there was absolutely no way on Earth you could continue to believe what you want to believe, you will find a reason, no matter how absurd, to cling to that which you hold true. There are people who claim to be good Christians who also believe in killing medical doctors. All life is sacred unless it tastes good on the dinner plate. Love thy neighbor as long as he isn't gay. And plenty of others hold the opposite view while claiming to be good Christians, and both sides will use the Bible to justify and rationalize their beliefs.

When there's that much leeway with interpretation, especially using a document that has been translated and retranslated and edited so many times in hundreds of years that the abstractions allow you to justify just about whatever you want to do, I'm thinking it's not quite so useful.

Now this scholar is claiming something that should gain attention from any Bible-loving community. This is something questioning the very foundation of the interpretation of the Bible, and it's not coming from a rabid atheist like Richard Dawkins. This is from one of the flock. An educated academic.

Outside of this Telegraph article I've heard nothing about this.

Which is a real shame. I've often questioned things like, outside the Bible, what third-party proof is there of Jesus and the miracles he performed? Or any of the miracles in the Old Testament? The Romans weren't slouches in keeping records during the Empire. Surely a guy going around creating wine from water and performing healing ceremonies with magic, especially when it was using a deity other than those blessed by the Emperor, would have third-party accounts recorded. So why do most of my questions end up being referred back to the Bible?

Anyway, I thought this was an interesting tidbit in the news that will no doubt flutter away with nary a blip on the radar. I'm willing to bet that asking the local preachers in my area if they've heard about it a few weeks from now, any little blurb, will elicit blank looks. If you're a news junkie or trivia buff, or interested in such matters at all, maybe my small readership could try it out as an experiment in their area! I'd love to hear the results!

Until next time, Happy Samhain!

Atheism and the Banana

One of the stupidest anti-atheism bits I had run across in my years came from Kirk Cameron and his buddy Ray Comfort and their viral video about the Atheist's Nightmare: THE BANANA!

They give such wonderful tidbits about the pulltab God placed so conveniently on the banana, as well as the fact that the shape happens to fit so well into our hands and it has it's own packaging.

For me it's funny because it's so hilariously ignorant. In case you didn't know, the Cavendish banana (the kind you normally find in the grocery store) is absolutely nothing like the wild banana. It was genetically engineered the old fashioned way by humans: selective breeding. Check it out here.

Of course it didn't take long for atheists to reply with those pesky facts. There's a YouTube video highlighting their ignorance on the topic.

I'll also point out that if you do research on the Cavendish, they're genetically all the same. There's a disease spreading that threatens the existence of that type of banana and those bugnuts may soon get a lesson in evolution since the Cavendish can't evolve a resistance to the disease...the solution seems to involve creating a slightly different hybrid banana with a slightly different taste and texture. Enjoy the atheist's nightmare while you can, folks...

Lesson: if you're going to take on a controversial topic, make sure you do your homework. Especially if you're going to look as stupid as these two clowns when talking about God's creation: a fruit that has a documented history of domestication by humans.

Creationism Bugs Me

I think I am beginning to understand one of the biggest reasons that the creationism movement bugs me so much. I got to thinking about it while skimming a book called Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul at a bookstore not long ago. It's the story of the semi-recent court battle over teaching Creationism in the classroom in Dover, PA. Sorry, Intelligent Design. Unfortunately there's a long history of bending semantics to try shoehorning the same idea into the curriculum of academia (see the evolution of the phrase "Creation Science").

What follows may be offensive to the more religious-minded. If you don't like having your ideas challenged you might as well quit reading now.

I have seen repeatedly that a significant percentage of atheists understand the Bible better than the majority of Christians. I don't necessarily mean quoting the Bible; I'm talking about understanding it. Anyone with time on their hands can memorize Shakespeare without understanding what Hamlet is really saying when telling Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunn'ry!" (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1) Getting into an argument over Biblical trivia is pointless.

The part that bugs me is quite simple. I would summarize Creationism thusly:
A magic being in the sky one day decided to create the Earth and various creatures on the Earth culminating in His ultimate creation, Man. Why he did it we don't know. He just did it. All creatures are the way they are because the magic invisible being just decided to do it.

This is, of course, paraphrasing. "Magic being" can be replaced with a number of different names, the most common of which in this area is God.

After poring over various Biblical passages the fundamentalists thus conclude that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Six thousand years ago God decided to create everything and at various points told people to record the events in a series of scrolls that later become the Bible (although most professing a strong belief in it don't seem to know the history of the Bible's origins)

That's pretty much it. Uncomplicated. Simple. Magic invisible being waved his magic stick and everything just popped into existence. The magic being has no origin, no end, nothing explaining where it came from. It's pretty simple to understand and any questions are usually dismissed with some vague hand waving.

Ask the good Creationist believer to summarize evolution and you usually get an equally vague explanation. Just some idea of creatures changing over time, if you're lucky, or the common one I had run into was that life just "sprang from nothing."

While the idea of Creationism is fantastically simple to understand...an invisible all powerful magic being who often is depicted looking like Milton Berle or Gandalf just decided one day that this is how things should be...evolution takes actual comprehension to understand. The people who want you to disregard the science usually have no idea what Evolution entails (especially the ones that say Evolution is bunk because life can't come from nothing; it's ironic both because they don't understand that evolution isn't a theory of the origin of life and also because these are the same people that say they believe in a magic being that has no origin, literally popping into existence from nothing. Or some idea of "always existing" or "exists outside this dimension". But evolution is simply way too crazy an idea for creationists to accept.

If you're going to cite that, demonstrate that you understand the math behind such an idea. Otherwise it's about as legitimate as The Force from Star Wars.

Unlike the idea of Creationism, Evolution has actual observable and provable hypothesis creating the foundation upon which it is based. It can be disproven; this is one of the fundamental ideas behind any empirical scientific theory. You can assert whatever you want. But it's not a scientific theory unless in some way it could be proven or disproven.

That is exactly why Creationism is not a science. It cannot be disproven or tested. This is a fundamental idea upon which science is based. How do you prove the nonexistence of God?

You can't.

Rather than rant or rave about that, here's my proposal. If a Creationist can accurately teach someone what evolution is, the actual science of evolution, so that that person understands evolution accurately then I would take them seriously in a discussion. They have to be able to teach evolutionary theory in their own words. Seems pretty simple.

The only way you can teach an idea to someone without simply regurgitating what a book states is to understand the idea. If you can teach someone else an idea in your own words; you understand the subject, and far too many people are proclaiming a strong believe in Creationism without having the faintest idea what they're talking about.

That is another bit of doublethink that leaves me baffled; if you are one of those people proclaiming a belief in an immortal soul, don't you kind of owe it to yourself to make sure you're right about your belief? I mean, that's quite a thing to leave to chance. So why hide behind dismissive hand waving and such when you probably should be devoting time to educating yourself about what you're investing your eternity in? Not just the memorization of Bible passages. Any goof can sit and memorize sequences of words. Rather, dedicate time to finding out what the other side is trying to tell about logical fallacies and mistakes, and understanding the history of the document which you are gambling your "soul" upon.

It's sad...there are far too many people who are entrenched in the idea that they are right about this magical history when they don't even know that the Bible wasn't a single document written in English.

Not that it matters much. True believers are often the move vehemently against exploring ideas that may contradict their belief system; they're too invested, emotionally, in the belief system to see beyond the world of comfort on which they rest their worldview. It may be psychologically damaging for them to entertain the idea that they are wrong about something so fundamental.

Or for many it's just easier to accept the simple explanation...magic, essentially...over learning what chromosomes and DNA are and how they work.

Creationist Museum Seen By Academia

Those who know me know it's no secret that I'm not big on the whole "creation science" movement. It's not a science. If you don't understand that it's not a science, it's because you don't understand the definition of science.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the 70,000 square foot Creationism Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Apparently some paleontologists topped off a conference in the area with a group tour of the facility.

Some of them happened to be Christian and were still surprised, saddened, and shocked at the material they found in the museum.

My favorite quote from the article:
********
"It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.
********

Not a big surprise. Usually the responses I see when academics criticize these things is simply dismissal of their claims. I think it comes from a friction between reason and faith; I can't fully claim to understand it because I'm simply wired differently. I cannot easily take something that runs contrary to observed or reasonable evidence. People who are very much invested in their beliefs...no matter what evidence is shown to the contrary, no matter how much you show that they hold views that conflict with each other...the doublethink will prevail for them. The Creationist museum is a prime example of this.

I mean...the Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian until Eve ate from the tree of knowledge? Really?

I should hope that the quote I believe is attributed to Jerry Lipps from the article is correct..."Like Sunday school with statues... this is a special brand of religion here. I don't think even most mainstream Christians would believe in this interpretation of Earth's history."

Columbine and the Cassie Bernall Myth: I Believe in God!

My wife has been enthralled with the book Columbine by Dave Cullen. I haven't read it but as she hits interesting bits she's been sharing excerpts with me. She highly recommends it.

The bit she shared that really bugged me concerned the story of Cassie Bernall. If you followed the Columbine aftermath at all you heard this story; one of the killers looked Cassie in the face and asked her if she believed in God. She said yes. He shot her pointblank for it, martyring her.

The problem was that this story never happened. It was a myth. Fabricated. With evidence to back it up. And the press knew about it as they reported it. The local papers didn't even come out with the truth until after Misty Bernall published the book She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall about the mythical incident passing it off as truth.

Emily Wyant was an eyewitness, hiding under the table with Cassie at the time of the shooting. She said that there wasn't any such exchange before Cassie was shot...the killer slapped the table, said, "Peekaboo!", and shot her before walking away with a broken nose from the recoil of the weapon.

The Bernall family later came out with a press statement saying "'Our intent was to share Cassie's story in an effort to encourage parents and teenagers. If any of our actions have hurt or offended anyone, we sincerely apologize.'"

The truth is that the story was hijacked from a young woman named Valeen Schnurr. From the Salon article:

**********
Schnurr was down on her hands and knees bleeding, already hit by 34 shotgun pellets, when one of the killers approached her. She was saying, "Oh, my God, oh, my God, don't let me die," and he asked her if she believed in God. She said yes; he asked why. "Because I believe and my parents brought me up that way," she said. He reloaded, but didn't shoot again. She crawled away.
**********

According to Cullen's book Schnurr, when telling the truth of the incident, was accused of trying to steal attention from Bernall. She was ridiculed and threatened.

Worse, the church, despite later knowing the truth, continued to perpetuate the myth because it served their purpose of recruiting more followers on the tail of the tragedy. Members with only a small shred of decency to respect truth over hype at most concede that it's the symbolism behind the story that's important, not the truth (NOTE: the link I put in here is from someone who is reviewing Cullen's book and stated that he regrets perpetuating the myth to a youth group upon learning the truth...this isn't accusing him of being one of those against which I'm spearing here. Read his entry for the section regarding his thoughts on that incident).

This is one more illustration of my "problem" with the state of organized religion in the US. Reason, truth...they don't mean much to the institution. Here it's illustrated that they'll knowingly perpetuate myths and falsehoods in order to further the collective agenda while even marginalizing or denigrating, in this case, a young woman who was actually victimized. They essentially victimized her twice, once through the Columbine incident, once by having a Christian institution try to silence the truth.

It's horrible to me seeing such cognitive dissonance among self-proclaimed believers as well; it hardly strikes me as Christian to see this kind of behavior from the church. Yet it doesn't merit a second thought from congregations.

Shameful.

Gay Marriage and History

Beauty contestant Carrie Prejean was bashed for her silly off-the-cuff answer, which she apparently characterized as biblically correct instead of politically correct, to a question from Perez Hilton about her opinion of same-sex marriage rights in states.

Too often I hear people justify the anti-same-sex stance as being anti-biblical.

Just today I ran across a couple articles that may question the validity of that idea...or at least give a little history lesson on the origins of marriage.

Chilling Effects in Teaching and Offending the Religious

I couldn't help but be intrigued when I stumbled across another site listing a student as a litigious douchebag. So I started looking around to find out what the hubub was.

Apparently a high school teacher was found guilty in a federal lawsuit of violating the first amendment by saying that Creationism was "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a lecture and thus offending a former Advanced Placement European History student by the name of Chad Farnan.

The news story can be found here.

Predictably this is causing a class A crapstorm, where Christians claim they are under attack in America (despite being the majority) and secular humanists yelling that this is simply rediculous to have such an idiotic lawsuit in the first place. PZ Myers, respected professor and biologist, had an interesting point in that Creationism as a movement is quick to point out that Creationism is a "scientific theory" (it isn't) that is separate from religion (it isn't) so it should be allowed in classrooms, but with this lawsuit finding in favor of Farnan, how can dismissing Creationism as superstitious nonsense offend someone's religious rights?

What perpetually amazes me is we still have people with some form of sense shut off when they decide to become teachers in schools today. This guy was expressing a personal opinion and due to some twerp getting offended gets...this being America...sued. Because of course appealing to a sky wizard to intervene, as is consistent with his beliefs, simply doesn't have any effect. Somehow the law of man must intervene to make an example of him.

Teachers are expected to shut off any sense of self when teaching lest they become the target of some pissed parents or lawsuit when some form of personality offends one of the kids or their overprotective, or in some cases plain ignorant, parents.

Express an opinion contrary to a student's belief? May get sued.

Maybe you are contrary to a student belief. Openly gay? Better watch your opinions being expressed. But you should tread lightly when breaking Suzy and Billy's liplock in the hallway between classes because it may be because you're not the same persuasion.

Just being a different gender carries dangers. Male teachers seeing a thirteen year old exposing her thong have to find a female teacher to address the issue or risk sexual harrasment...for enforcing a (GASP!) dress code!

Don't get overly friendly with students. Don't interact with them outside classes unless you must. Keep doors open. Don't touch them either.

Try explaining why Creationism isn't science in class. It's pretty simple...it doesn't fit the scientific method. It cannot. It does not. Here the application of actually explaining the issue in a class where it has legitimate reason to be taught may offend someone...and cause a royal crapstorm because it offended someone in the class.

I'm amazed there are still people with some form of crazy optimism that they can make a difference in teaching. There's simply too many drawbacks for me to see a positive benefit to doing it; this is just a rant about offending some nutters to feel bad about something you may or imply while going about the course of teaching while suffering from the condition of being human. Teachers are expected to be teachers, counselors, substitute parents, moral pillars, all while be accountable for the utter lack of ambition and getting the blame for parental failures in actually raising their kids while not having the tools for holding the students themselves accountable for their behavior. Oh, and teachers are expected not to have lives, opinions, or personalities of their own.

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.