"and we're all too smart to talk to god..."

"I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously."

-Douglas Adams

i think that faith is something you're born with. i believe that those faithful christians, the ones that grow to be atheists later in life, never actually did believe in god. i think that they, like me, spent that time trying hard to establish a belief in him. they, like me, wanted to believe in him. it's just that some circumstances can push you over the fence into strict non-belief. faith and intelligence, in my opinion, are two sides of a scale. faith, more often than not, blinds common sense. religious people often find themselves praying and waiting on a miracle...relying on the strength of some phenomenal cosmic being rather than themselves. same thing applies to the inverse: the more self-reliant and personally aware a person becomes...the more knowledgeable they become, they put that much less faith in religious deities. now, i am in no way inferring that the religous faith-based population consists of the less-than brilliant. what i mean to say is that those religious types usually find a balance in that scale between faith and their full intellectual potential. now, take with that also the fact that if a scale is balanced, neither side is at its full potential.

in short, religion is the twisted ankle of an intelligent body.