Are you a religious person? Do you believe in God or Allah or Jesus? If so, then I would like to show you something about yourself that may really surprise you. It comes from the breakthrough book How God Works.

Here is the proposition: The only reason that you can believe in your god is because of tangled thinking in your brain caused by things like doublethink. Doublethink is a mental process that lets you believe in two contradictory ideas simultaneously. Once you eliminate doublethink and resolve the tangles it creates, you will no longer believe in God. In addition, you will be a much better critical thinker, and the benefits of critical thinking will become available to you other aspects of your life. The goal of the book How God Works is to help you through this process. Let me give you several examples so that you can understand what I am talking about.

Let’s say I ask you this question: Why do you believe in God? Your answer might go something like this: “I have lots of reasons to believe in God: God hears and answers my prayers. He has answered countless prayers for me. I also have a personal relationship with my Lord Jesus Christ. In addition, I hear God speak to me when I read the Bible. The Bible is God’s Word. There is so much evidence in my life that God is real.”

So I say to you, “OK, Great – let’s pray: ‘Dear God, please put ten $100 bills in my hand right now.’” How are you going to explain the failure of this prayer? You might say, “God can’t do that – that would take away faith. You would have evidence that God exists, but there can’t be evidence because God must remain hidden so people can have faith in him.” Do you see the problem? You have exposed a tangle in your thinking. An intelligent person cannot state, “My life is full of evidence that God exists” and then a minute later state, “God cannot provide evidence that he exists because of faith.” The two ideas contradict each other. Similarly:

• You cannot claim that, “The Bible is God’s word” and also that, “God must remain hidden.” A being that is trying to remain hidden cannot also be the author of a well-known book.
• You cannot claim that God is answering your prayers all the time, and that’s OK, but then claim that he won’t answer my prayers because that would take away faith.

You expose the doublethink happening inside your head when you contradict yourself like that.

Let me show you another one of these tangles. You believe that God is answering your prayers. Yet today, and every day, 29,000 children will die of simple, easily solved problems like starvation or cholera [ref]. It adds up to about 10 million innocent children dying per year. So why don’t you pray to save the 29,000 children every day instead of praying for solutions to the trivial, tiny problems you have in your life? And why wouldn’t your god answer a prayer like that immediately, meaning that zero innocent children die today and every day? Or why doesn’t God save those children immediately even without your prayers? Being omniscient, he can surely see their suffering. Your ability to hold these two contradictory thoughts simultaneously – “God answers my prayers” and “God will let 29,000 innocent children die today” – is a clear marker for doublethink.

Here is another example. I ask you this question: “Is God a good, loving, moral being?” Your answer might be, “Absolutely! God is love. God is good. The Bible says so. And God judges us when we die because God is the absolute moral authority.” So I respond, “How can you believe that God is good and moral in light of Noah’s Ark, where God killed millions of adults, children and animals?” If you are an intelligent person, you can see the contradiction immediately. God cannot be good, loving and moral, and then simultaneously be a heinous, genocidal murderer at a global scale. Doublethink is the only thing that allows you to hold those two contradictory ideas in your head simultaneously. As soon as you eliminate the doublethink and accept that God is a heinous monster in the Bible (there are dozens of examples), you can no longer believe in God as a good, moral being.

Here is the thing that I would like to help you understand today: Doublethink is a mental process that harms your ability to think clearly. It is a staple of talk radio and politics as well as religion, and our society would be a much better place if we would work together to eliminate doublethink and a dozen other similar thinking problems from the public dialog that shapes our society.  How God Works is the breakthrough book that will help you to recognize and correct the faulty mental processes that allow you to believe in an imaginary being like God or Allah. Order “How God Works” today by clicking here.

Learn more: How can any intelligent person believe that God is good?