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The phrase above pretty much sums up my own attitude to Christianity through most of my life. All I knew for sure was that I didn't want to be a Christian (I wanted to be and do, what *I* wanted to be and do); and I defended this rather specific unbelief by a fluid mixture of reason and emotion.
In general, I thought of myself as far more intelligent and rational than Christians, far more honest and tough-minded.
Yet I always knew and sometimes said that if a Roman Catholic apologist (I always assumed that this would be a Jesuit, for some reason) could ever pin me down, then I could be defeated by logic - because these guys had memorized and practiced all the answers to every possible objection.
But I still knew that I was right because Christian rationality was, I believed, a facile achievement of post hoc reasoning - reasoning from the result to the premises. So I would reject all this scholasticism, without even meeting it, because I knew in my guts that they were wrong.
It was a heady feeling to know that nobody could persuade me of Christianity, that I could always find reasons not to believe, whether reason or gut feeling, and that therefore I would remain un-defeatable as the master of my own private destiny.
I was, in fact, a case history of the overmastering power of pride: pride revelling in pride; and this not just by accident but as a matter of highest principle and core conviction.
Pride as the primary Good, the highest value.
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