A shocking number of Americans believe God personally anointed Trump to rule the country

[Caliman73]

43. This is one of my problems with Religion in general.

I used to practice. I went to Catholic school from 2nd to 12th grade. That meant weekly mass and mass on holy days of obligation. That meant Catechism Monday through Friday. I was pretty devout, until my early 20's, even though I was definitely not exemplary in following the doctrine.

One of the things that was always in the back of my mind is that in the same school, I was taught Math, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, History, etc.... which required a grounding in evidence, logical argumentation, and sourcing; in order to practice my former faith, I had to compartmentalize. I had to suspend logic, evidence, and sourcing to believe that some eternal being that I had no direct evidence for, sent his son, who was also Him, who also had a 3rd entity, who was separate but the same; to Earth, to live and die for sin committed by the first two humans, who that god created perfect, but who that god allowed to be tempted to disobey god (mind you, if god is omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent then god knew this would happen), that perfection would be lost and a blood sacrifice would need to be made. I had to believe that this man, who was 100% man and 100% god died then rose from the dead, and would come back at some point to judge everyone and decide who would go to eternal happiness and who would be tortured for eternity.

Now as humans we are prone to all kinds of weird and contradictory thoughts. Being non religious doesn't confer special powers of logic. However if you are to truly follow the faith, you have to believe things you have absolutely no evidence for.

Christians will mock Mormons and everyone mocks Scientologists because "their religion is stupid and made up" but what I described above is foundational to Christianity. Sure it isn't Xenu having some space war and planting Thetans in volcanos, or Jesus coming to America and preaching to the Natives between his death and resurrection, but Christians tend to act like their beliefs are logical and Mormons and Scientologists are just weirdos.

In almost every religion, you have to shut down your logic and reasoning and believe in fantastical stories. You have to believe in things that no one has ever witnessed and take the word of ancient people who appeared to be simply trying to understand and explain their world without the modern advances in science and the accumulated knowledge we have today. Those ancient stories are the basis of action of so many people today. We mock people like this Wallnau, or the people who think that Trump was "chosen by god", but that is a matter of degrees for people who still practice most (at least theistic) religions.