The problem with you is that a person can not disagree with you without seeing you going into automatic shutdown mode.  When it happens between us, I can see a veil of fog falling over your face, and nothing I say from that moment matters.  At the risk of sounding like I'm bashing religion or being elitist, I have to ask...is every person "of faith" so faithless?  It's almost as if every opinion you have is more than just conjecture, more than a guess or curiosity.  The world is set, and everything must be as you think it is, or else your world may fall apart.  I think I understand, but if not, please enlighten me.

Your parents, who you love, trust, and cherish, took you to church and told you through words, actions, and rituals that their belief system was the right one.  Or perhaps you found your belief system when you were in the pits of some despair and felt a holy presence lift you and support you through your tribulations.  You built your life around this belief, and when part of your mind had questions, you either got no answers, or (more likely) got answers like, "You just have to have faith," or "God moves in mysterious ways."  Maybe you used to have a desire to question things that made little or no sense, but you found quickly that if you continued down that path, it might lead you away from the place you felt you were headed, so you learned to think in circles.  You learned that the good book is holy because it says it is.  You learned that contradictions in that book don't really mean what they say, but that you must follow the book's teachings in order to be worthy.  Your instructors told you that you are your god's child and that you have free will, but if you don't do as you're told, you will pay for it with an eternity of torture.  And although you know (first-hand) that humans are fallible and unfathomable in their duplicity, you decide that it can't be wrong if so many people believe it.

If you think of me as a heathen or a doomed soul, I encourage you not to fret.  Your god is not an entity that I would worship.  I would expect any entity worth my worship to lack the qualities I would find in the dregs of society.  Jealousy, rage, revenge, grudge-holding, holding women as chattel...not my idea of worship-able.  My own god would never punish anyone for not being able to discern which human was telling the truth.  And I like doing good things, helping people, telling the truth, and being kind and compassionate...just for their own sake.  I don't need threats of eternal agony to prod me not to be bad.   I hope we can still be friends, but I bet your god tells you that I'm not allowed to play over at your house anymore.  Figuratively speaking, of course.