How can fundamentalists not wake up?

[YGninja]

Sure you weren't indoctrinated at college and told the truth during childhood? Do you think that your college is impartial, or your professors, or the ones deciding their wages and the curriculem? What do you ground that belief on?

Reading the Bible cover-to-cover twice is what broke me of being a Christian, and it was in college that I realized that at some point I had become an atheist, through a combination of learning more about science, more about logic, and more about religion.

I can even recall the exact semester, though not the day, that it happened: I was taking Logic 201 and Introduction to Religion the same semester. My religion professor was an Orthodox Christian and big on apologetics. My logic professor was big on fallacies. As I learned the various fallacies, I watched my other professor making them in every single one of his arguments. He was an intelligent, learned man, and he had to turn his mind into a pretzel to try to justify his belief. And I see that over and over in theists, especially literalists: perfectly good minds, twisted into pretzels trying to convince themselves that their faith is reasonable.

Some professors may try to indoctrinate you, my religion professor certainly did. But the thing that breaks people's faith in college is finding out what their parents and ministers didn't tell them. Of course, the effect of preparing a child for the revalations of college just means you endanger their faith sooner, if you're a fundamentalist.

Of course, going to college tends to have little effect on the faith of liberal Christians, who weren't taught that evolution is a lie and science is a conspiracy to perpetuate that lie and everything in the Bible actually happened exactly as portrayed. A certain comfort level with ambiguity is a strong defense against new facts breaking your faith.

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Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

Far from it. In college (except for Bible college, of course) one is generally rewarded for fact-checking.

And Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy if the authority appealed to is an inappropriate one. Appeal to Einstein on the General Theory of Relativity, and you've committed no fallacy. Likewise if you refer to Stephen Gould on a matter concerning biological evolution. It isn't possible to be more of an authority than the people working in the field concerned on everything. Where you run into trouble is appealing to Einstein on theology or Gould on celestial mechanics.

But if you really have a problem with, say, the Theory of Evolution, there is nothing preventing you from learning it backwards and forwards and seeing the evidence for yourself by visiting museums, laboratories, and active digs. Get a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology or paleontolgy and expose the conspiracy from the inside!

The Bible is an ancient book, parts of it over 3000 years old. Reading it cover to cover is not really sufficient, if you have no contextual understanding.

It seems like one of the reasons for you leaving the faith is, in your mind, witnessing your religious professor committing fallacies in his apologetics. But that would be a fallacy in itself, namely, the fallacy fallacy, ie that a claim is wrong because a fallacy was used in support of it. Breaking faith because of things your parents didn't tell you would also be a fallacy fallacy.

The issue with the science conspiracy thing is quite interesting, because there used to be no such thing as "science", it used to be "the philosophy of x", ie biology, physics etc. Science introduced apriori naturalism, the answer must be naturalistic else it is not plausible. This is the synthetic science paradigm and why that paradigm has always generated atheists. It is this paradigm which is the grounds for such theories as of evolution, by way of circular reasoning.

"Only naturalism exists",
"Life needs a naturalistic explanation",
"The only plausible naturalistic explanation is that somehow tiny molecules came alive and gradually grew more complex",
"Evolution is true because it is the only reasonable explanation",
"Evolution disproves God",
"Only naturalism exists".

And it is the paradigm which zealous devotion to it as an explicator for all things is dangerous, is if the explanation is not naturalistic, science will never find it. Relying on science as an explicator for all things also necessarily relies on human cognition to be able to explain all things, and such a position is self defeating, as you assume infinite cognition - a supernatural property. Kinda reminds me of "I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High." - The most core principle of Luciferianism.

The truth is that there is a conspiracy, but its not something im going to labour on because i think most of you have too strong normalcy bias to be able to acknowledge it. Essentially it was catalysed during the enlightenment and has its roots in the ancient mystery schools of Babylon. Who supplied the light for the enlightenment? Lucifer the Light-Bearer, ofcourse. In essence, the science paradigm was born out of Luciferianism, for the purpose of creating atheists, who are in principle indistinguishable from Luciferian, although don't self-acknowledge it.