We’ve all given Manti Te’o a lot of flak lately. His story is that he was duped into believing he had an online girlfriend, when in fact such a person did not exist. We are all laughing at him for it, and calling him a liar. That’s not really fair. Most skeptics know exactly how it feels to be duped into believing we have a special personal relationship with someone who isn’t real. Most of us used to be religious.

With this in mind, check out this video by Schmoyoho, and feel the sympathy flow forth from your cold skeptical heart.

For those of us who used to believe in God(s), we can attest that that the pain and feelings were real, even if the object of those feelings was not. We know that feel, finding out everything we believed to be reality isn’t reality at all. Such a discovery is overwhelming, disappointing, and unbelievable at first. Like Manti said, your whole world is telling you one thing, whether it be that you have a pretty online girlfriend that you’ve never met, or that there’s a magical leprechaun in the tree, or that an all-powerful creator of the universe whom you’ve never met cares about you deeply. It’s the same thing. It’s an earth-shattering realization to discover that there is no such thing. I embrace the Manti Te’o story as a symbol for losing one’s faith in a personal relationship with god(s). This not only helps me to empathize with Manti, but with all those believers still under the duping penumbra of religion as well.

Everything in their world is telling them that God(s) are real (aside from atheists, of course), and the feelings are all real. When a Christian feels pain at not being worthy of God’s forgiveness, it is a real pain, caused by this relationship they’ve been encouraged to have all their life with this nonexistent person. It breaks my heart. It makes me wish I could snap my fingers and give them the gift of skepticism. But I know that wishing I have some power does not mean that I have that power. I know that my positive thoughts and prayers have no causal efficacy. To believe such things is to be duped, and I refuse to be duped.

Instead, I’ll try to illustrate the danger of letting non-epistemic reasons guide one’s beliefs. Rather, I’ll let Schmoyoho do so.

Whether it be gold, or the promise of eternal reward, a non-epistemic (non-evidential) reason is not a good reason to believe something. As the song illustrates, it is important to consider competing hypotheses: It might be a crackhead who got into the wrong stuff, rather than a leprechaun. Rather than God speaking to you, it could just be your imagination, or your internal monologue, or a partial complex seizure.

Be wary of crude sketches, representations, and records of the entity in question. Be wary of crowds joyfully affirming your non-epistmically supported belief. These things do not constitute evidence. A raucous mob, enticed by reward and novelty, is no more evidence for the existence of God(s) than is the crowd above evidence for leprechauns. It is still more likely a crackhead who got into the wrong stuff.

Be wary of those seeking to capitalize on the duped in their belief. The Pat Robertson’s, Ray Comfort’s, VenomFangX’s and Uri Geller’s are nothing more than fake Irish charlatans with fake magical flutes.

The humor in both of these videos reveals the underlying hypocrisy of our society: Being duped into believing in a fake online girlfriend or getting excited about a leprechaun is somehow more shameful than being duped into thinking the creator of the universe is your personal friend with whom you have daily conversations. Fundamentally, there is no difference between the three beliefs. The subjects of these videos, our former believing selves, and those who still believe all suffer from a dupe. The leprechaun people at least have currently living ‘eyewitnesses,’ and Manti at least saw photographs of the person he thought he loved, and at least received communication from her that came from somewhere outside his own head, if not from the person he thought. Can theists say as much? Sadly, they cannot; yet they laugh at Manti and the leprechaun folks.

The lesson here is to fight the wishful thinking, and accept the possibility that you are being duped. This is difficult. Who wants to believe that his or her girlfriend isn’t real? Who wants to believe that it wasn’t a leprechaun? Then there would be no romance. Then there would be no gold. Then there would be no heaven. Life without these things may seem scary at first, but with enough intellectual courage, one can accept reality for what it is, and seek the good things that really do exist to be obtained.

But seek with epistemic caution. Reality can really hit you hard, Bro. This guy knows what I’m talking about.