Sagan nailed a hard human pattern: once we’ve believed something long enough, the truth can feel like an attack. And in the church, that shows up when tradition becomes identity, when questioning a system feels like questioning God.

That’s when evidence doesn’t get weighed, it gets rejected. Not because it’s weak, but because admitting “we’ve been taken” is too costly.

The call for the church today is simple: love truth more than belonging, and Scripture more than reputation.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)