People often ask me why I left my faith.  There are no good short answers to that question, but one of the simplest ways to explain what happened is to describe the games I was taught to play to protect my beliefs and to keep them immune to falsification.  Stepping outside of my own thought processes long enough to see how these games work probably went further than anything else I did to convince me that my religion was all inside my own head.  “Know thyself,” the Greeks wisely advised.  That’s certainly where it started for me.

Confirmation bias can be a powerful thing.  When you have a strong personal need to believe something, you set out to verify your belief with a mixture of motives.  You want to know if what you believe is true, but the cost of disappointment may be so high that you become susceptible to…