Re: It's true--you've tried your best with the 'elites' methods.

Well, really sorry to be so predictable, but thanks for the permission to believe as I choose. Appreciated. For the record, I didn't create my beliefs. They existed long before I was born, and I was inexorably led to them by the evidence, which was good enough for me. It may surprise you to learn, again contrary to assumptions you have voiced elsewhere, that I was not 'born' into my faith. I actually conducted a fairly thoroughgoing 'due diligence' about Christianity before I seriously considered it.

That due diligence included such books as Who Moved The Stone? by Frank Morrison, The New Testament Documents - Are They Reliable? by Prof. F F Bruce, Runaway World by E M B Green, Ring of Truth by J B Phillips, and Difficulties in the Bible by R A Torrey, among many others. So nobody 'programmed' me, as you like to put it. I did not commit intellectual suicide either when I came to faith, which I did from a position of atheism. Despite my advancing years now, I am still in full possession of the same faculties I had before becoming a Christian, and none of my fellow-believers have ever insisted that I relinquish my capacity for independent thought in order to join the massed ranks of 'sheeple'. 

Contrary to the caricature you seem to delight in portraying, we are not an amorphous mass of mindless zombies who utter amen to everything we hear. We put our own individual talents, personalities, gifts, intellects, etc to the service of our Lord, mainly in response to and gratitude for what He has done for us, and whether you acknowledge Him or not.

Of course, I don't expect any of this to make the slightest difference to your attitude to me or my faith either, but at the very least it sets the record straight on some of the assumptuions you have voiced about me, quite apart from the equally predictable vitriol you dished out earlier. I'd expect nothing less from an implacable opponent of the truth. Now, please tell me all that was predictable as well, and that you've heard it all 1,000 times before.

But despite all of that, rather than because of it, my expose might still hold a few surprises for you. Who knows?