(December 24, 2015 at 9:49 am)Jehanne Wrote: Daniel Dennett's example of a parasite taking control of ant's brain certainly applied to me:
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on...anguage=en
While I was in college, I attended a fundamentalist Baptist Church, the kind which believed in the 6-day, 4004 BC thingy. I remember one time a professor at my school berating me, stating that, "This University has failed any student who believes in this (Biblical literalism)." On one hand, I was ashamed of the fact that I was attending a regional university while, on Sundays, attending a fundamentalist Baptist Church. The truth is, however, that I attended this church regularly so that I could meet other college women; I was lonely and I wanted a girlfriend. While part of me knew that their beliefs were a bunch of bullshit, another part of me really tried to "believe" in it, or at least deceive others and myself into thinking that I truly did believe in it. The women whom I wanted to date (with little success, by the way) were attractive and went to church in attractive, feminine skirts and dresses, which they did not, typically, wear while going to class. And, I liked being around them. But, as with the parasitic brain worm that takes control of an ant's brain, I was being, in some sense, "controlled" by my hormones, being led to "profess" a religion that, deep down, I knew was bullshit. I shared many of my doubts with the college pastor of the church (it had several pastors), who told me, more or less, to engage in "self brain-washing" (of course, he did not use those exact words), by reading the likes of Josh McDowell and scores of Christian fundamentalist tracts, and to definitively not read anything contrary to Christian Biblical fundamentalism. For awhile, I complied, being led by my weiner; however, the multimedia era in which we live caught up with me (not to mention my college education) and overcame my desire to date feminine, skirt-wearing fundamentalist Christian women. In the end, I had no choice but to conclude that Biblical fundamentalism was pure bullshit; my abandonment of theism would come later on.
So you never believed. You were just going to pick up chicks?
Sounds like the thread should have been titled "Confessions of a current atheist sexual predator"
