A former atheist contemplates the irrationality of atheist opposition to religion:
I had something of an epiphany. One night, after a long dinner, I was walking back to my hotel in downtown Salt Lake City at 2am and I suddenly realised: I felt safe. As any transatlantic traveller knows, this is a pretty unusual experience in an American city after midnight.
Why did I feel safe? Because I was in a largely Mormon city, and Mormons are never going to mug you. They might bore or annoy you when they come knocking on your door, touting their faith, but they are not going to attack you. The Mormons’ wholesome religiousness, their endless and charitable kindliness, made their city a better place. And that made me think: Why was I so supercilious about such happy, hospitable people? What gave me the right to sneer at their religion?
From that moment I took a deeper, more rigorous interest in the possible benefits of religious faith. Not one particular creed, but all creeds. And I was startled by what I found. For a growing yet largely unnoticed body of scientific work, amassed over the past 30 years, shows religious belief is medically, socially and psychologically beneficial…. Crucially, religious people lived longer than atheists even if they didn’t go regularly to a place of worship. This study clearly suggests there is a benefit in pure faith alone — perhaps this religiousness works by affording a greater sense of inner purpose and solace in grief.
This begs the question: Given all this vast evidence that religion is good for you, how come the atheists seem so set against it? They pride themselves on their rationality, yet so much of the empirical evidence indicates that God is good for you. Surely, then, it is the atheists, not the devout, who are acting irrationally?
Not only acting irrationally, but arguing nonsensically as well. I have pointed out on occasion the way in which the desire of some atheists to kick out what they see as a crutch out from under religious believers is an indication of a malicious character. If atheists persist in their attempts to destroy religious belief in light of this growing body of empirical evidence of the beneficial nature of religion, it will prove that their primary motivation is neither truth nor reason, but pure malice and ill-will.
Moreover, such evidence is one more nail in the coffin of Freudian pseudo-science. Since real science indicates that religious belief is good for you versus the Freudian claim that it is unhealthy, those atheists who still cling stubbornly to the outdated Freudian position will be revealed as overtly anti-science, their scientific pretensions notwithstanding.
Don’t miss the comments. It is always amusing to see the self-professed “intelligent” and “educated” atheists revealing their blatant ignorance by citing the usual nonexistent prison statistics, misleading divorce statistics, and imaginary military history.