you send yourselves to hell

[Mudhammam]

Aw Sheesh, here we go again! I can just see rayaan sharpening his ritual disemboweling cutlass again.

I consider myself a Christian for two reasons.

1. I had what I considered to be a spiritual experience of God. Now I know that a spiritual experience of God is pretty hard to distinguish from an experience of being Batshit crazy. But I choose to believe the former because it is more comfortable, and because it's reproducible to a degree. Since this experience was in the context of Christianity it is irrevocably tangled up with Christianity.

2. I've experienced a far better life following the laws and moralities I've cherry picked from the new testament.

My Christianity is functional. I tend not to evangelise because my reasons my Christianity are almost entirely argument from personal experience and thus only really apply to me. I did have a go at intellectualising those experiences from a purely psychosocial point of view and although that fit perfectly well, I did not like it much. So on the basis that I get to believe whatever the hell I like I recanted my flirtation with Atheism and reverted to my old framework.

I can hold my hands up to a charge of intellectual dishonesty here, choosing to believe that something objectively less likely is true because it feels good to do so. My only defence to that is "Fuck you" . I consider it akin to believing my kids are the best kids in the world. It gives me pleasure to believe so and so long as I don't give you a hard time because your little shits lick windows and eat paint, I don't see a problem with that.

I understand where you're coming from actually. Still, on some level, you must feel that it can't really be more than a comforting delusion...no?