Belief and Fantasy

The thing that puzzles most Free-Thinkers, like myself, is the strange habit many people have of accepting the most impossible and bizarre ideas, based on evidence that is meager at best or idiotic at worst.  In fact, there seems to be, for most believers, an inverse relationship between Truth and Evidence.  For many people the lack of evidence becomes the strongest argument for the Impossible.  For example, millions of people believe in the existence of Extra-Terrestrials here on earth, and the absolute lack of credible evidence for this seems to have become the strongest evidence for its truth.  They believe that mysterious Men-in-Black visit people who have evidence of alien spacecraft, steal the evidence, and then disappear.  Certainly, this idea is extremely convenient for the believers.

I imagine that some Atheists believe that something similar happened in the Dark Ages.  Every time a non-believer found evidence for the purely human nature of Jesus Christ, a group of black-robed Jesuits would arrive, steal the evidence, and disappear in a puff of sanctified smoke.  Certainly a lot of evidence for the Arian view has been suppressed over the centuries, but we don't have to concoct any mysterious Jesuits to explain this.  Most of the evidence for Christ's non-divinity was simply allowed to disappear, to fall out of history.  And what could not be ignored was easily distorted, misinterpreted, and disguised.  For example, references to Jesus' brothers and sisters had to be "re-interpreted" once the Catholic Church decided that Mary was born and died a virgin. 

Today the Catholic Church seems to take the gullibility of the faithful as a given.  Bishop Law can proclaim that Father X, Father Y, and Father Z are not child molesters, no matter how many children claim otherwise.  And, according to court papers, Fathers X, Y, and Z have been relocated to where they no longer have access to children to molest.  And since the Bishop (or one of his minions) makes this claim, the faithful are obliged by Faith to believe him.  Non-Catholics are often surprised by the willingness of the faithful to accept these claims, without any proof whatsoever.  Nor do the faithful seem to be bothered at all by the fact that they have, for years, taken Holy Communion from the hands of a child-molester and sexual predator.