In Praise of Doubting Thomas

One of the things about Christianity that drove me to abandon it as a bundle of absurdities is its insistence on blind faith - faith in the absence of any evidence and directly in the face of all reason. Perhaps no story better exemplifies this deeply irrationalist strain in Christianity than the parable of Doubting Thomas, and P.Z. Myers does a great job of explaining what is so wrong with it. To believe in things one has no evidence for and which defy reason is an irresponsible abdication of intellectual responsiblity rather than a virtue, while it is to the Doubting Thomases of the world that we owe all the amazing gains in knowledge which have occurred over the last few centuries; if only the world had many more Doubting Thomases, rather than billions of credulous people ever ready to engage in the most disgusting barbarisms because some fairy tale or other by some self-styled "prophet" told them to.