Contradictions

So, in my new (edit: new-ish? it's been almost 9 months) job, I have the wonderful ability to plug in my headphones and listen to whatever I like. Hell, I can even use the speakers I brought in from home to listen if I'd like. It's nice an office. The upshot of this perk is that I've been listening to a lot of backlogs of public radio shows, like CarTalk, This American Life, and RadioLab, and various podcast (which I'd never really understood the appeal of until now).

Of course, when it comes to listening to shows like This American Life, I'm going to end up listening to some story with a christian bent of some sort, whether it be a story about christians, by christians, or for christians. Mostly their shows have topics other than religion, but occasionally there's a story that just rubs me the wrong way, or straight up flabbergasts me.

I came across one of these shows not too long ago (episode 304: Heretics: the story of Reverend Carlton Pearson
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/304/heretics) which overall I found to be an interesting story, particularly when looking at the divisions that arise within the christian factions. However, there was one particular sentence in the show that got me all worked up. It comes about at about 4 minutes 27 seconds into the show, but you should probably listen from 4 minutes onward if you're going to get the whole gist of it. He's discussing an event from his youth where he cast the devil out of his girlfriend, and how at the time, he believed in devils and so he saw them. This single statement is such a telling part of religion, and one of my core ideas in understanding why religions are they way they are:

"So, if you believe it, you experience it."

I literally stood up when he said this (once again, a perk of having an office is that I can look like an idiot in private). This man is still a pastor, still a believer (though not in devils, which is the whole point of that radio show. It's worth a listen if you don't know the story) and yet, this sentence falls from his lips.

I just simply cannot understand how a person can utter these words as an explanation as to why he no longer believes in the existence of evil spirits and devils, but does not recognize the next step that the same logic holds true for the good spirits and angels and gods. The hypocrisy leaves me very nearly speechless.

Though not quiet, or else I wouldn't have much of a blog post.

Christians seem to do this rather often if you ask me. They use one bit of logic when it suits them, but fail to understand that logic is logic, no matter what you apply it to, holds true throughout.

The idea that you will experience something if you believe in it is one that took me a very long time to understand. I used to think that I experienced god. I would try to see god in the world around me because I believed in god. It is a hard cycle to break, because it is self sustaining, each half of the cycle supporting the other. I believe, therefore I experience, and I experience, therefore I believe.

I only broke the cycle through a long period of self reflection, which I only managed because I stopped one part of another, closely related cycle, that of going to church. (Going to church bolsters my believe, so I believe strongly enough that I want to go to church and be 'with god'.) It took a long time to realize that fact about myself, and about the world around me.

Likely the response to this argument against religion is that I believe in other things (i.e. evolution, various scientific phenomena) so I experience them, but therein lies the differences between religion and science. I don't have to 'believe' in science. There is evidence, there are facts, to support the science. I don't have to believe in the weather god for it to snow in April (fucking weather god). It snows in April in Wisconsin because the empirical atmospheric conditions are in the right state to create snow.