For my entire life I have been listening to people “testify” to their experience of finding God. It was particularly often in college, where, after all, each of us spent a lot of time searching for our way instead of finishing our homework.

I thought of this process as I watched a YouTube video of a man testifying. It is called Jesus Christ Saved Me from 27 Years of Homosexuality, and it tells the same story as pretty much every Christian testimony I have ever heard: “My life was a swirling miasma of treachery and debauchery, I hated myself, then suddenly I got a magical feeling and Jesus saved me.”

It’s never, “I have spent the last 40 years in careful thought and research, and Jesus was always with me.” Never. Once a guy on campus in college told me that Christ came to him in a vision after he’d taken a bunch of LSD. Brilliant.

I suppose that appealing to the wretched, the unhappy, the dispossessed, the lonely, and the suffering – humans in their most vulnerable state – is the most effective way to get them to join your cult of sameness.

Ratings for the video, the buttons you click for Like and Dislike are, of course, disabled. If they weren’t, about a grillion of us would click the dislike button. In recent years, the expressions of such opinions have been labeled as “victimization” and “marginalization” of Christianity. The victim culture is another powerful way to sway weak minds, but it is never a route to the truth.

Also of note is the common claim by Christians that they, “Live and let live.” This is probably one of the biggest lies told by Christians in general, and no one who is paying attention to what is happening with Christianity believes it. This claim is often followed by something like,  “I’ve never seen anything as bad as the atheists attacking theists…” (actual quote from a forum.) That much is true, because we atheists see Christianity as dangerous and fundamentally wrong.

Watch the video and you’ll see how silly and childish it is.