Today is Easter. Here's to Forty Years Spent on a Delusion: A Life Wasted?

On Easter 1973 I became a Christian. That was forty years ago. 40 YEARS AGO! Last year this time I had written:
I have decided that unless something drastically happens to change my mind, this time next year I will quit what I'm doing. I only have one life. I think thirty-nine years spent on a delusion will have been enough. First I'll have to find something else to do that will annoy people, but what it is I haven't figured out yet. ;-)
Since I haven't figured out what else to do I guess you're stuck with me. I will be changing my focus though, as I previously said. It hurts my head to think I believed that crazy stuff, the kind I now think is no different than any other religious faith, because faith is the problem! It's an irrational leap over the probabilities. Better yet, faith is a cognitive bias leading people to overestimate the confirming evidence and to underestimate the disconfirming evidence. If faith isn't the problem then what is it?

Sometimes I question if I've wasted too many hours of my life on a delusion, first as a believer, then a minister, college instructor and now as a debunker. Maybe others of you feel the same. If so, welcome to the club. Remember though, that it does no good to dwell on what could have been. Keep also in mind that so long as you're not dead the future is still wide open. If you find yourself debating Christians online too much then maybe you should reconsider. Christianity will die out. We know this. We know this if for no other reason than that human beings will evolve into another species who will find any religion based on humanity to be nonsense. Maybe that's too far off into the future for our likes but it will happen, if nothing else. So enjoy life. As an eighty year old man told me recently, "Do not deny yourself any pleasure." Part of what gives me pleasure though, is to know that what I write helps others. So as the Bud Light commercials say, "Here we go!"

1 comments:

Unknown said...

I am new to atheism. I was an evangelical myself. Thanks for the work you have done.