I can feel your anger

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

I was brought up devout Irish Catholic,and attended Catholic schools

At 16 I began asking serious questions about original sin,free will vs God's omniscience,the problem of suffering, plus some of the Church's loopier beliefs such papal infallibility and indulgences. I left the Church at 20. Took another 20 years of asking questions and finding only more questions. Becoming an atheist was not a conscious decision; one day I simply realised I no longer believed.

Today I have only contempt for the intellectual masturbation that is theology and biblical exegesis. Nor do I have any time for apologists who insist on citing the bible as proof,knowing they are dealing with a skeptic and atheist.

My frustration with apologists on forums is not about 'understanding'. Saying "you just don't understand "is simply an arrogant ad hominem. My frustration comes from constantly seeing doublethink and cognitive dissonance elevated to art forms. It's like trying to reason with a rather dim,recalcitrant child.

If you could reason with religious people there wouldn't be any ( Greg House)

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oublethink, a word coined by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, describes the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.[1] It is related to, but distinct from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Its opposite is cognitive dissonance, where the two beliefs cause conflict in one's mind. Doublethink is an integral concept of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The word doublethink is part of Newspeak

http://atheistforums.org/newreply.php?ti...rocessed=1

Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment.[1] The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements.[1] An example of this would be the conflict between wanting to smoke and knowing that smoking is unhealthy; a person may try to change their feelings about the odds that they will actually suffer the consequences, or they might add the consonant element that the smoking is worth short term benefits. A general view of cognitive dissonance is when one is biased towards a certain decision even though other factors favour an alternative.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance