"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now." (Link) -- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Cognitive dissonance is a term that refers to the uncomfortable feeling that comes from holding two or more conflicting viewpoints.
In the process of my ongoing search to discover why liberals are so remarkably, (one could even say ostentatiously), off the beam, I've come to understand that cognitive dissonance plays a large role. (Link) and (Link)