As a young man, immersed in the secular spirit of the age, I thought I needed to choose between reason or religion. One couldn’t choose both because one contradicted the other. We could have the comforts of religion but only by abandoning reason, or we could accept the demands of reason which precluded the belief in any religion. Accept the cozy lie or embrace the cold, hard facts. That was the choice facing all of us.
It wasn’t until I was older and began to take an interest in reality on a deeper level that I began to question whether rationalism was in fact rational. It seemed to me that nobody could know that God didn’t exist. Atheists seemed to accept their atheism as a matter of faith, not reason. Most of them didn’t want God to exist and so chose to deny his existence. This is not rational but merely wishful thinking.