No institution has done more to arrest intellectual progress under the guise of divine authority than the Church. For over two thousand years, Christianity has braided guilt and power into a crown it insists you wear humbly.

Apologetics, especially the polished, genteel flavor popularized by C.S. Lewis and his successors, don’t exist to explore truth; they exist to protect a premise. They’re emotional sleight-of-hand, designed to trap the curious in recursive loops: “Believe because belief is good. Doubt is dangerous because we told you so.”

I say this not as a casual observer, but as someone who got caught in that cycle in my own youth, and was haunted by it well into adulthood. It’s easy to mistake eloquent circular logic for wisdom when it’s wrapped in authority and printed in gilt-edged pages. But logic doesn’t bend to faith. And when your only evidence is the book that demands belief, you’re not reasoning—you’re reciting.

Definitely coming back to this one to dig further…