Those who believe without seeing are blessed?

To become a Catholic priest today, one must undergo a rigorous course of philosophical study, over the course of several years. But this focus on logic and reason hides the fact that religion is not only anti-rational, but is motivated and altogether grounded in pure emotion, despite attempts by learned men to argue everywhere that this is simply untrue. 

That Jesus makes the claim that "those who believe without seeing are blessed,"  only suggests to the atheist that Christianity is unmistakably a cult, and nothing more. 

Indeed, were the very same words spoken by the likes of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Heaven's Gate, Pol Pot, or Alistair Crowley, to bolster the legitimacy of the "blessed" message being sold by such charlatans, not a single ardent Christian would think it wise to simply "believe" such claptrap. 

But when the Christian is told they should take pride in the fact that they are "humble" for having accepted the "infallible truth" of their Christian "beliefs," without questioning or requiring any evidence to support the legitimacy of so blatant a confabulation, they only think they are being brave for having done so.

That the same Christian refuses to so blindly accept any other "truth" claims so equally devoid of supportive evidence, and routinely criticizes anyone and everyone who does so for any system of "beliefs" other than their own brand of Christianity, from political to economic, never leads the Christian to recognize, let alone willingly admit, that they are simply a hypocrite to suggest their own "beliefs" are truer than anyone else's. 

Such a willingness only proves that the claim bandied about so often by Christians, that "you must believe in something or you will believe in anything," is itself a lie designed to hide the "truth." 

And that "truth" is that once a person is conditioned by religion to believe something without sufficient evidence, and indeed without a necessary willingness to critically question the claims of their religion at least as much as they feel compelled to critically question the claims and "beliefs" of their opponents, they are willing to believe anything and everything that can be yoked to that religion, from the claim that the legitimacy of slavery is grounded in the Bible to the claim that "witches" are real because the devil is. 

"Those who believe without seeing," in other words, are only as "blessed" as those people in padded rooms and asylums around the world,  who are convinced they are covered in spiders that no one else can see, or are even Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ.