When You Lose Your Faith You Gain your Reason

"The path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge." – Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The nine words of the title to this article condense all that I have been trying to say on this blog over the past few years into a single sentence.

I was watching a video of Christopher Hitchens the other evening and he said it as a throwaway line. He never developed the idea and it was hardly relevant to what he was talking about. He almost said it as a mistake and he quickly moved on to talk about something else. But I seized upon the quote and resolved to write something about it for you.

Not that it will help me to convince Christadelphians of the error of their ways. Like all religious people who hold to a faith based conviction, their conclusions are driven by emotion, prejudice, childhood conditioning, confirmation bias and a whole range of different things that have nothing at all to do with reason. Anyone who treasured reason as highly as I do would not be a Christadelphian in the first place. Or like me they would resign when they realised that their reason had been subjugated and corrupted by cognitive biases to the demands of religious doctrine and delusion.

But nevertheless the title of this piece is a truism and the reverse is also a truism: When you gain your faith you lose your reason.

You simply can't have both. As Lawrence Krauss has said "Faith is believing in something for which there is no good reason to believe." If there was a good reason to believe in the object of the faith then it would not be "faith" it would be "fact." But because Christadelphianism is not supported by credible evidence it remains a faith. Emotion not reason has to be the driving force behind acceptance of the religion. When emotion and reason clash, reason rarely comes out ahead.

That is why my task on this blog is so difficult and thankless. I am campaigning to Christadelphians who are emotionally convinced that their faith is supported. Their feeling that their faith is valid is so strong that all evidence to the contrary is instantly challenged by their brains. They simply cannot accept that there is no evidence for the resurrection of Christ, or that God created the Universe, and that Bible prophets most certainly did not predict a modern day return of the Jews to Israel. For them to even begin to contemplate the truth of these statements would mean an enormous emotional upheaval the scale of which you cannot begin to imagine. I know because I was a Christadelphian for twenty years and it just blew my mind when the penny finally dropped and I realised that the entire religion was just a jumbled heap of nonsense.

But I can speak from personal experience and tell you that while you reel from the loss of your faith, you realise that what you have gained is infinitely more valuable than what you have lost; because you have gained your reason.

It's fantastic getting your brain working again after Christadelphianism. I did it and it is the most wonderful thing in the World. It's like recovering from a mental breakdown and feeling all the clear thoughts flooding back into your mind as you get better. Cognitive biases no longer channel your thinking along convoluted paths defending preposterous paranormal ideas. Your brain starts to work like it is supposed to work and in the words of the song: "I can see clearly now the rain has gone."

So the 95% of Christadelphians who value emotion and faith over their reason must ignore this blog and look elsewhere on the Internet for things that interest them. They don't think like I do and I consider their way of thinking to be shallow. I don't write for them.

But to the very few Christadelphians who feel a flicker of interest when I write this way I have this to say:

This could be the start of your journey to gain your reason. If you are intelligent; if you are a thinker; if you value intellectual honesty and unprejudiced thought; if you have the nerve to overcome the cruel chains of your family religion that have shackled your thinking to a fantasy for so many years. Above all, if you value your reason above your salvation, then heed what I am telling you. Because I'm offering you a roadmap to gain the most precious thing in the entire Universe: Your Reason. Gain that and you will see clearly.