(October 18, 2015 at 11:46 am)Redbeard The Pink Wrote: You're actually highlighting an interesting point about belief there, blondie.
Theists commonly argue that belief is a choice and that atheists simply choose not to believe in Gaud because they've had negative experiences and/or they just want to sin.
Your story, on the other hand, suggests that all the negative experience in the world won't necessarily cause a person to "choose" to abandon their faith. Because of the way you perceive and understand evidence, you continue to believe in Gaud because you think that's how the evidence lines up. Even though you at times have had many reasons to want to be able to stop believing, you can't because you don't actually have a choice in the matter.
Neither do we. When we are asked to consider Gaud, we're looking at something that simply looks ridiculous and impossible, especially in the case of the Christian one. It has paradoxical qualities, it's "inerrant word" is full of errors, there is no empirical evidence of its existence, and there is a large heap of evidence to suggest that it is a fictional character and an amalgam of other man-made gods that predate it. By our standard of evidence, there is simply no reason to believe that Gaud exists in any form man has named.
Thanks RedbeardThePink.