@georgeob1,
Once again George Laurence Sterne offers a plausible explanation.
Quote:In this case, continued my father, which Plato, I am persuaded, never
thought of ---- Love, you see, is not so much a SENTIMENT as a SITUATION, into which a man enters, as my brother Toby would do, into a corps ---- no matter whether he loves the service or no ---- being once in it -- he acts as if he did ; and takes every step to shew himself a man of prowesse.
Like being in Love, and being much else also, atheism is a situation. It is not a sentiment. One might enter the situation when young for a number of reasons and once in it pride does the rest. Take the happily married man as a good example. He needs to maintain how happy he is because otherwise he has to admit having made a ghastly error. Which means he is a mug. And that is not going to happen when they have such a high opinion of themselves.
The "blind credulity" is the early stage. Pride does the rest.
Basically, the insistence is a measure of the insecurity. It's himself he is trying to convince. He's no hope of convincing me. So he must like banging his head against walls as well.
