There’s a long, long list of things etched into the back of my mind regarding crazy religious people. It’s easy for me to add to this list because, among other things, I was a crazy religious person. I remember a shouting match in an after school debate where I insisted evolution was a complete farce. When I was finally reduced to answer a logical question with a logical answer, I opted for Christian Reponse #68. Well, I don’t want to live in a world where there isn’t a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my back yard.

The only response to this type of argument is total abandonment of principle and a resort to nonsense, such as physical violence. It is in our nature after all, and this trait was certainly apparent on the face of the kid I was arguing with. He “knew” he was certainly right, but he did not realize that I knew I was certainly right. I imagine I was more confident in what I was saying than he was.

There is no best or even good approach to arguing with a confident fool. It is nonsense. If you are certain that the religious person you are arguing with is confident, and that your genius Christopher Hitchens questions will have no affect, then:

1. Remind the person of the role of the faithful. A man of faith has no business arguing about the finer points of anything based in an empirical world, outside of religious texts. If you take it on faith that that God made the creatures, then it isn’t acceptable for you to be critical of evolutionary science. These practices are mutually exclusive, and any attempt by a person of faith to enroll in scientific dialog is blasphemy and unethical.

2. Tell them they don’t really love Jesus. That’s a caveat to Christianity — you don’t really believe it. When I was a Christian I said to others and to myself that I loved Jesus. (I also told myself that I was going to stop eating too many tacos, but I did not.) Sam Harris says that we partition our mind to accept religion without applying our standard rules for rationality. I disagree with him in this respect, because I don’t think its possible for the mind to work this way. The mind isn’t like a computer hard drive, and just like you can’t partition part of your gut to process only certain foods, you cannot partition your mind. We process everything we hear, and no matter what we say we feel, our mind doesn’t allow is to truly believe something that we can’t rationalize.

Now, before I go too far, I want to say that I understand there is a large gradient of both ideas and fashions of belief. My point is that when your brother says he’s going to pray for you, he doesn’t think that he needs to run home and pray for you right now, lest you succumb to the wounds from the car wreck and perish. He tells you and himself that he will pray, and he may or may not. Either way, he does not believe this prayer is a pivot to your safety or survival. This formula can be applied to most religious beliefs, even the most precious, the belief in Jesus.

Christians want to believe that Jesus is real, and they can make it real for them on a social level, but their minds just won’t allow it to dig deeper (unless they are really, really dumb). This is why the religious aren’t compelled to drop to their knees and beg for forgiveness on-the-spot; they just don’t honestly believe they need to.

- Person W