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while the reasoning of religious people is always simple, uncomplicated, and truthful, the mental activity of irreligious people becomes especially subtle, complicated, and untruthful. I will take the commonest example, A man is addicted to depravity; that is, is unchaste, unfaithful to his wife, or else lives immorally being unmarried. If he is a religious man he knows this is wrong, and the whole force of his reason is directed toward finding a way to free himself from his vice: avoiding association with adulterers, increasing his labors, arranging a rigorous life, not allowing himself to look on women as objects of lust, and so forth. And this is all very simple and can be understood by every one. But if the depraved man is irreligious, he immediately invents all sorts of reasons why it is very good to love women. And here begin all kinds of most intricate, cunning, and refined considerations, about the affinity of souls, about beauty, about free love, etc., — which the more they are developed the more they obscure the question and conceal what is essential.
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from “A Confession” by Leo Tolstoy