When I was a young child I believed in God for the same reason I believed in the president or England: other people told me and seemed to act as if there was such a thing, so it didn’t even occur to me doubt it. I also believed in Santa Claus until maybe the age of 8. Fifty years later, I’ve seen lots of evidence that the president exists. I’ve been to England. I even believe in a lot stranger things like neutrinos and mitochondria, mostly because almost everyone who seems to know anything about these things believes in them and tells me I should too. It also helps that believing in them doesn’t seem to lead to any obvious contradictions or problems.<\/p>\n
On the other hand I don’t believe in string theory because some people who seem to be smart and have deeply investigated these topics either don’t believe or actively disbelieve. I’ll even say I don’t believe in quantum gravity. I don’t disbelieve in quantum gravity, but there are enough contradictions and problems with every quantum gravity scheme anyone has ever proposed to make me cautious.
\n<\/p>\n
But God? I’ve still not seen any evidence that God exists. The “evidence” people present is so weak it doesn’t really qualify as evidence at all. And there are also a lot of very smart people who tell me I shouldn’t believe in God. Have there been obviously smart, educated people who told me I should? Yes, there have, but as a much older adult I’ve discovered many of them were actively lying to me. I don’t mean they were telling me things they believed to be true but weren’t. I mean they actively disbelieved themselves, but were telling me they believed because it was their job or role to do so. This is very common amongst Catholic priests. Maybe as many as 50% of Catholic priests are effectively atheists, or at the very least some sort of deist. This is probably true in other religions too. I just have the most personal experience of knowing priests over decades amongst Catholics.<\/p>\n
This is not something you’ll learn in a casual conversation with a priest during coffee hour after Mass. But if you actually know them as people outside of the church and outside of a pastoral relationship? You’ll learn it eventually. Over a period of years, you’ll see some of the priests you knew as children leave the church and admit they were closeted atheists for a very long time. Most of them did believe earlier in their life, perhaps during the early years of their ministry. Ironically it can be the detailed study of the Bible, church history, and church doctrine that leads them away from the faith. A priest knows far more about these things than most laity do, so it gets progressively harder to ignore the outright contradictions and sheer WTF in the official story. Not everyone who reaches this point leaves. Some stay and continue to lie to their flock because they feel they have no better option in life. Changing careers at 40+ is hard, and seminary doesn’t really prepare you for many other careers.<\/p>\n
And of course that’s just about the very big question of whether there’s some supernatural creator being or beings at all. As soon as you dig down into the details of any one religion, even something as general as Christianity, there are still more people in the world who will tell you you shouldn’t believe it than that you should. More people disbelieve that Jesus was the Messiah than believe. You can make the same statement for any other religion. More people don’t believe it than do. Belief because you were told only works as long as everyone you know believes. The younger you are the more likely that is to be true. When your whole world is your mother and father and siblings, sure. Going to Catholic or evangelical grammar school is unlikely to change very much. But once you graduate into the wider world, you can no longer believe just because everyone else does since, as rapidly becomes apparent, everyone else doesn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a young child I believed in God for the same reason I believed in the president or England: other people told me and seemed to act as if there was such a thing, so it didn’t even occur to me doubt it. I also believed in Santa Claus until maybe the age […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[302],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005661"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1005681,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005661\/revisions\/1005681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}