In Mathew Hansen’s letter “Belief vs. scientific method,” he points to indoctrination as one way to explain many peoples’ belief in God. I will use myself as an example in which he is wrong.
I didn’t start going to church until my 20s, after taking World Religions in college and thinking for a long time about God. What brought me to church was not a belief in any one church, it was a belief in God. I had always felt it despite not ever going to church (except for an extremely short stint when I spent 4/5s of the time in child care before being allowed to sit on pews and not understand a thing being said).
For many it just comes from inside. It does not have to be dissected, looked at under a microscope, submitted to a rigorous multi-pronged double blind study. You have your belief (atheism) and the rest have our own. You believe that you’re being logical because you can’t find any basis for what we believe. Yet you can’t study what is in our heads and hearts.
Call it illogical if you’d like but your contempt for what you don’t understand does not make what you think any more correct than those who go to church and think you are illogical.
We are just opposite sides of the same coin.
Keep your belief in nothing and be happy and the better of us will leave you alone to believe in what you don’t believe.
Susan Wolfe, Salt Lake City