RE: Why I'm Still a Christian
March 1, 2015 at 12:36 am
(This post was last modified: March 1, 2015 at 12:43 am by The Reality Salesman01.)
(February 28, 2015 at 11:46 pm)Lek Wrote: The thing is that many more christians have re-examined their views and have come out of it as stronger christians.They weren't trained properly in the habit of critical thought. God beliefs are logically impossible, and logically impossible ideas do not hold up under proper critical scrutiny. If they became stronger Christians, it's because they either did not know what it meant to examine their views critically, or they were prevented from noticing the flaws by the biases that safeguard them. Outside of a mental condition (GC), there's no third possibility that leads to stronger faith.
(February 28, 2015 at 11:46 pm)Lek Wrote: It's also true that many atheists have re-examined their beliefs and have become christians.Definitions alone make that true. A person who has never believed in God is an Atheist. But just knowing that they didn't believe in God and now do, tells us nothing about how reliable their reasoning was. These people are just as likely to be duped by the same fantastical stories as children are. Christians who claim to evaluate their beliefs only to find them strengthened and previous non-believers seeing the light are both evidence for the importance of understanding what constitutes truth and what cannot be known.
It's quite another thing to point out a devout anesthetized Christian who later discovers their ability to deconstruct faith based ideas using the tools of critical thought, who later realizes they've been very mistaken their entire life as a result. I've never met one of these. Once you get out of the trees, there's no way you can forget seeing the entire forest. It just doesn't work that way.
With regards to Christians who stay Christians and Non-believers who adopt a belief, a quick scan around this site will demonstrate that in either case, If their faith was strengthened, there was at least a fallacy or two in their reasoning.
Once you see how the Magic trick is done, no matter what your attitude was toward Magic before, you won't be able to believe it really happened the way it once appeared to.
