We will examine one parasitic feature of religion. This feature helps it to gaslight. People are confused. They often try to paper over that by thinking it is faith. While a confused faith is faith, it may just be confusion as easily. When you go along with nonsense and lies and what you don't really believe, you soon think you believe. So what is the feature? Paradox. Theology calls it mystery. The insinuation is that you are arrogant if you think the mystery is just a cover for something being unintelligent or too much to believe. So the doctrine seeks to make you biased and afraid.
A paradox looks like a true contradiction. Fraudsters get you to mistake contradictions for paradoxes. But in fact a contradiction is only words. It is nothing. 1 and -1 are 0.
So paradox is when two things are true though they contradict each other.
So how do you resolve it? Well, it is not a contradiction simply because contradictions are nonsense and we know neither is nonsense. The problem is our understanding.
The only way you can tell a paradox from a contradiction is if one side is virtually as certain as the other and both are certain beyond reasonable doubt.
Big evidence is needed for a paradox. The bigger the paradox the better the evidence has to be. The more importance you give the paradox then the greater the evidence has to be. Don’t cheat. Provide the case for it. The concept of paradox is being abused on ideological grounds without that condition.
Nobody has the right to declare something a paradox. It is up to them to be the messenger of the evidence. Let the evidence do the talking as it were.
The only valid paradoxes are in physics but religion invents ones of its own. Religion like any ideology, will generate and claim paradoxes where the evidence is not good enough that there is an actual paradox. The evidence that both sides of it are right is lacking.
Hinduism has the paradox of how weak man can be God, master of the universe. Christianity has the paradox of Jesus being an ordinary human being and also God at the same time. The Christian Science Church says that evil is not real and yet it claims to battle it. Mormonism has the paradox of a fraudster being thought to be the best person next Jesus who ever lived, Joseph Smith.
Let us mention a core religious application of the paradox.
There is no great evidence that we really have free will. We fear the consequences of not believing people are responsible for what they do and are not programmed or conditioned to do it. Not wanting to believe something does not make it untrue. It in fact warns that a too much bias is happening so arguments for free will will lack credibility for that reason. Even if they were valid, it does not follow we have the arguments because they are good but because we want them. The paradox here is how we are pushed to affirm that we experience free will and that experience is valid. In fact you should just notice it instead of being forced like that. So we need bias and fear to detect free will? That makes no sense. Religion does not care and treats it as a paradox.
Another good example is an unlimitedly powerful and good God tolerating intolerable useless evil and remaining good.
More examples: God makes all completely and so controls all. So our evil choices are as much his as ours. They happen more because he gives us the faculties and creates the situation that invites evil than because of us. So they are MORE his than us. We are just fall guys. This God does not and cannot love us.
Dead men stay dead but Jesus rose.
Certain cancers don't go away but Mary's did.
So – that is why we need a high standard of evidence. That is enough. (Forget about strict proof!) That is the only way to avoid contradicting the truth or contradicting ourselves without realising.
Why do I care?
Because one dubious paradox is as good as another. and we need a culture of consistent people. Inconsistency is a mark of populist thinking and ideology and even well-behaved ideologies. It will not benefit long-term to put up with that.