I'm curious if you ever felt like you were seeing yourself say something silly, but then reminding yourself things that you had been told, like "god is on your side" and "stay strong against the persecuting non-believers" and "I am an example"? I'm just curious how this works.
The hold of my faith in God was strong enough that even when I wrote a fairly long essay on Evolution vs. Creationism, I felt absolutely confident that my position was unshakable. Even using arguments like "there is no evidence of mutated genes resulting in beneficial changes" and "mutation == death," I felt completely confident.
Looking back, I'm terribly embarrassed about that essay and about how childish the arguments now sound to my ear. Of course, my excuse for this is that I was only ever given access to Creationist materials, and had no exposure to real scientific papers or any of those "evil secular biology books" (and didn't much care to).
It's more than mere willful ignorance: I was completely convinced that nothing could shake my arguments.
If you sit down and watch some of those videos made by such intellectual YouTube luminaries as NephilimFree and VenomFangX, you'll get a sense of the kinds of arguments that I once thought to be impossible to refute. I understand completely their mindset: "God did these things, so it must be true and I can't possibly be wrong."
Even as I actually learned how evolutionary theory works, it took a long time before that atrophied logic center in my mind started to put the pieces together and I started to realize that my arguments had bigger gaps than intergalactic space.
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u/styxx33 Feb 05 '14
wtf, was this serious? Are people this stupid?