Being Clever...Too Clever

DEVOUT CHRISTIANS often times try to be intellectually clever, like a lot of other folks, say, in academia. There is a story in the great novel "Siddhartha" in which Siddhartha Gautama spoke with the enlightened Buddha himself, and they conversed, discussing deep philosophical matters. Siddhartha uses clever arguments. The Buddha admonished him: "You are very clever. Be careful not to be too clever". But the clever Christian argument is this: "I'd sure as heck rather be a believer, and be disappointed to find out when I die that there is no heaven and no Jesus and no God, than to be a non believer non Christian all my life only to discover after I die that the Christian religion and its cosmic paradigm is the truth, the whole truth, and the only truth, and to find myself standing before the Christian God on my judgment day. As usual with Christians, I couldn't disagree more....I'll be damned, so to speak, if I am willing to live my entire life as a delusional believer in a false religion, no matter what, case closed, end of story. And if, having lived my life as a secular humanist pantheist I die only to discover that the Christian religion is true lock, stock, barrel, and Bible......well then, damn the consequences and may the devil take the hindmost, as Davy Crockett used to say. If there really and truly is a God of the Bible, if the Christian biblical God is God, and is as harsh, cruel, tyrannical, and psychotic as he seems to me to be.......why then, the hell with it, and I'll you all in hell, and I reckon we'll just suffer together eternally, just like the way you conservatives Christians seem to believe and want. Can you even remotely imagine living in a conservative Christian universe, with hell, judgment, damnation, and all that? I cannot. Or maybe, if I can, I can only do so as a strange, free thinking excursion into my most science fictiony and fantastic imagination. And, I thnk God that's all it is, or can ever be. There is, and alwasy has been, a huge academic industry defending the Christian faith using supposed logic; "apologetics", its called". The sum total of its writings fills libraries. And yet, at the end of the day, nobody has ever yet shown any strong arguments as evidence for the existence of the Old and New Testament biblical God. My preference is to live this life with an open and inquiring mind, rather than to constrain my intellectual being to an uncritical, blind faith belief in any particular body of dogma, religious or otherwise. As the saying goes: let us admire everyone who sincerely seeks truth, but never trust anyone who claims to have found it.