We've probably all heard that old maxim that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing most people that he doesn't exist. However, there is a lie that is common to the secular West that is equally pernicious, and that's the idea that our beliefs have some control over objective truth.

Many people in the West have a hard time accepting the idea that religious beliefs are not some a posteriori justification for existing prejudices and desires. It doesn't even occur to them that many religious conservatives really aren't comfortable either with the idea of Hell and things like that.

The difference is that the religious conservative doesn't believe that his or her beliefs have any bearing on what is actually true. The best and simplest explanation of the way that many people approach these sorts of truth is from Red versus Blue, when they said "we don't need to find weapons of mass destruction, we only need to want to find them. That's how it works!"

Unfortunately, that's not how it works. A desire to find WMDs doesn't make one less of a fool when one goes to war ostensibly to find them, and finds out that the casus belli was a crock of excrement. Likewise, you can reject the existance of Hell, God, and everything else associated with religion, but if you die and stand before the God of Israel unsaved, your rejections will have no bearing on what happens to you from that point on. You can say that you reject this or that teaching, but if God does not, then what has your rejection amounted to?

Many of these rejections and acceptances are not based on evidence, but rather emotion. When they are not based purely on emotion, they are based in logic that is built on a foundtion of very little practical data. Logic is only as good as the data it is operating on, and the data that the human mind unmolested by spiritual interference has about spiritual things is less intellectually respectable than the search for WMDs in Hussein's former stomping grounds.