(March 30, 2017 at 3:05 pm)emjay Wrote: @MK. I was a strong Christian until the age of 18, when cognitive dissonance finally did its thing and out of the blue it clicked for me 'there is no God'. I remember exactly where I was when that happened, such is the imprint it left. Up until then I stubbornly and ignorantly defended Christianity at every turn, much to the annoyance and mockery of my atheist friends... because pretty much everyone except me was atheist. If this site had been around back then and I'd come on it, Min and everyone else would have had a field day with me as a chew toy but it wouldn't have made any difference to how I felt. Now like they do in things like AA, I wish I could go round all my old school friends and say 'you were right, there is no God (and Nintendo is better than Sega... [another bad call I made])'.
In my case there was no desire to leave Christianity when my click happened... no intellectual quest to disprove it; I was happy enough being a Christian and I didn't know anything else. I knew I was gay, and that was in conflict with it and the main cause of the cognitive dissonance I felt... but I accepted the consequences and implications of being gay and a Christian, and still had no (conscious at least) desire not to be a Christian... if anything, I wanted to be both. And that's ultimately what cognitive dissonance is... trying to make compatible that which is not compatible... the first-person experience of being gay compared to the third-person way it is portrayed in the Bible... one thing telling you you're wicked and unnatural vs experience telling you you're just in love. In the end, the mind cannot handle holding two contradictory world views at the same time, so it clicks, and settles on one or the other. And that's what happened for me. And once it had, I saw the world from a completely new perspective and saw all the things I had ignored as a Christian, and more and more stuff started to click, gathering momentum in leaps and bounds.
So regarding your OP I assure you I have no hope or expectation of changing the minds of emotionally entrenched theists; no-one could change my mind back then, only my own mind. In my opinion, the only way out of a comfortable delusion is initially through cognitive dissonance... then it is only a matter of time before it just implodes under it's own weight of contradictions, as it did for me.
That last paragraph says it all. Just like a smoker or drinker wont quit until they want to. The believer will stay where they are at until that light bulb pops with cognitive dissonance.
