“Well, I want to believe there’s a God.”

What?

“…I said, I want to believe there’s a God.”

…What? What does that even mean? You say you want to believe there’s a god as though you have some sort of choice in the matter.

“Well, I can choose to believe anything I want!”

…Really? Prove it. Believe you’re an elephant.

“… … … <Half-hearted elephant impression>”

No, you see, you can’t. You can act like an elephant, you can make sounds like an elephant, you could disguise yourself as an elephant, you could even consort with elephants and become one with elephantine culture, but at no point will you actually believe you’re an elephant.

We don’t have any choice in what we believe. It’s absurd to suggest that we do. We can hope that something is true, we could prefer that something were true, we might wish that something were true, we can even live our lives under the tentative assumption that something is true, but either you’re convinced of something or you’re not. You can’t choose to be convinced of something. I want to believe I’m a superhero. But I don’t. ‘Cause I’m not fucking mental.

What really gets to me, though, is not so much that your statement is incorrect. What really pisses me off, what frustrates the hell out of me, is that you presented a meaningless, vapid bit of platitudinous nonsense as though it was not only relevant but a weighty, indisputable hammerblow of a point that won the argument. I am consistently baffled by religious people’s apparently complete inability to separate what they would like to be true from what is true. These are entirely separate things, and that you want to believe there’s a god is no more relevant to this discussion than my wanting to believe there’s ice-cream in the freezer.

If you don’t want to talk about something, that’s fine — you started it, by the way; I wouldn’t have brought it up — but don’t enter into an argument and then think you’ve won by using vague language to present as relevant an utterly irrelevant bit of incoherent tripe.