Catholicism of all things
Of the branches of Christianity, and perhaps of all religions, Catholicism has the most developed theology, the most rigorous set of justifications for belief, the longest intellectual tradition and tries the hardest to be convivial with reason. Other branches and other religions would be a lot more surprising (unless you're counting Quakers and Unitarians, for which religion has very little to do with "belief" as we understand it here.) Especially for a self-described virtue ethicist.
I think you're forgetting about Orthodox Jews, who have the Catholics beat on pretty much all counts (age, complexity, and at least arguably "reason"). Of course, it's all mere rationalization -- the bottom line has already been written. And the Orthodox tend to reason within their framework rather than trying to justify their framework to outsiders, presumably because they're not seeking converts.
Catholicism has probably spent a heck of a lot more money on complex proselytizing than Orthodox Judaism. Also Catholics were competing with the Protestants - rabbis have no real competition, since their only audience is Orthodox Jews. But mostly, my point is just that there's this huge, worldwide organized Church that has spent who knows how many equivalent billions of dollars on theology. It's amazing how little they've accomplished, really, given how much they've spent and how many geniuses it wasted (theology was the string theory of its day), but they still did end up with something. Probably an equivalent amount of raw genius, if not money, was wasted on Orthodox Judaic halacha, but in a much less competitive, outside-world-facing way.
My formerly agnostic girlfriend of over 5 years just joined a local Catholic congregation.
The best thing you can do for your friend, is to be a friend. Listen to her and support her as a fellow human being. If you have an agenda for what you want her to be, she will most likely be able to sense this.
Just be her friend and accept her for who she is. If she finds that the Catholic community doesn't accept her wholeheartedly, be there for her. If she finds acceptance there, then accept that too.
Hating people for being wrong is a seductive and tricky thing and can lead to unproductive situations. Limited but generous forgiveness and acceptance are optimal strategies in an imperfect world with imperfect communications channels and fallible actors. (Refer to: Axelrod's Prisoner's Dilemma tournament, and a Tit-For-Two-Tats.)
There's always the possibility she will change her mind again. Ask yourself, would you want to be permanently shunned because you didn't come to the correct conclusion fast enough? What would you think of a community with members that acted in that fashion?
It's difficult. I decided to end a friendship recently, due to the friend's wholehearted embrace of catholic doctrine. I just didn't want to be around someone with her views on homosexuality, abortion and contraception. Not sure if this was the right decision, but I no longer found her company enjoyable, and I thought I was unlikely to change her mind.
I find it much easier to be friends with more liberal christians. They are wrong, but in a way that I find easier to deal with.
ETA: could someone explain why this has been downvoted twice? I'm quite new to this site, and would like to know how to avoid this.
ETA2: No longer downvoted, so ignore previous question!
Picking your friends by their politics seems like a bad way to maximize personal well being, unless they insist on talking about it all the time. Indeed people who ostracise others because of ideology are often the ones who can't stop talking about it:
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. --Winston Churchill
Most people compartmentalize quite well and most humans are hypocrites. In the real world people with weird or "evil" ideologies can still make great friends and can be good people. And people with wonderful sounding belief systems can be horrible human begins. Don't underestimate the utility she may bring you and how much utility you can bring her by continuing the relationship.
Note that if she is into virtue ethics she may view severing your friendship over religion a breach of loyalty, not something she would do, which means you are sort of defecting. (;_;)
I'm getting to be quite old, and I have very little tolerance for people with strong political beliefs. For people I meet in passing, I generally ignore stupid beliefs and simply transition the conversation elsewhere - it's not worth the time and effort.
However, for anyone I'm going to spend more than passing time with, I usually ridicule and/or contradict what I consider unproductive beliefs if they are expressed strongly. This puts the target on notice that I don't approve and that they had best not talk about it in my presence; occasionally, it gets rid of the target completely, a fact for which I have been grateful many times.
My reasons for so blatantly violating social norms centers largely around the fact that no matter what action I take, I will have at best minimal impact on this person. If I support their view, it is reinforced. If I do nothing, they assume I don't have a problem with it, and it is likewise reinforced. If I directly contradict their view, it also reinforces it, as discussed repeatedly in the articles on this site.
Quite frankly, I have limited time remaining, and better things to do with that time than try to fix an occasional broken belief system in a low- or normal-functioning person. If you're not going to lead and you're not going to follow, then get out of the way.
I wonder if anybody has advice on how to handle this
I personally would refrain from publicly criticising her thinking, life choices and core identity on the internet. For example:
But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry and how often I thought she was taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah. I remembered how I thought she had a confused conception of meta-ethics and that she often seemed skeptical of reductionism, which in retrospect should have been a major red flag for purported atheists. So yeah, spending all your time arguing about Catholic doctrine really is a warning sign, no matter how strongly you seem to champion the "atheist" side of the debate. Seriously.
... this is insightful and valuable as a warning to others and for your own future reference. But it is more something to do once the victim has already been written off and attempts at influence abandoned.
Too late, Jay! I found the thread :)
But you guessed right, I don't mind the comments above at all, but they'd be more conducive to a productive fight if things like "taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah" were hyperlinks.
Maybe it's just me, but the premise of this post rubs me the wrong way. "Thwarting" a conversion? It seems kinda... I don't know. And I'm probably one of the most anti-theistic people that I know or have interacted with on the Internet. It's not like you're trying to prevent her from slipping into alcoholism. As long as she stays fundamentally the same person, I don't see what the big deal is. People should be respected for how they treat others, not what they believe.
That said, I've read a few "convert back to Christianity" stories and a lot of them have similar hidden/leading indicators. There's always some sort of family/significant other factor; it was usually a huge sticking point during their deconversion from religion. I don't really know a lot of this blogger's backstory, but are her family and/or significant other Catholics? That would explain the jump straight from atheism to Catholicism without some sort of intermediary stage (e.g. deism, generic Christianity, etc.) based on my own personal prior probability about how these things happen.
So if that's the case, "thwarting" again seems sort of insensitive. At least to me it would be insensitive language in this context.
When I first read my friend's post, I had a major "I notice that I am confused" moment, because it just seemed so implausible that someone who understood actual atheist arguments (as opposed to dead little sister Hollywood Atheism) could convert to religion, and Catholicism of all things.
Catholicism is actually one of the intellectually more formidable religions. If you accept a few key axioms of Christianity (and even most atheist Westerners do) and think about their implications for a lot of time it seems remarkable how vulnerable you are to converting to it.
In Christianspace, for the intelectual who likes playing around with very abstract dry concepts Catholicism seems to be a strong attractor. While protestants have played around with reversing its stupidity traditional Western civilization is fundamentally Catholic civilization. It gets the halo effect from a whole lot of art and great thinkers and pretty Churches. Then there is also the sheer majoritarian argument in its favour since it is by far the largest denomination and has institutional continuity going back more than 1500 years. When people around the world think Christianity, they think Catholic.
Also as...
Adjacent to your point but:
John Rawls derived progressivism from pure reason.
Late Rawls abandons these pretensions. His theory of justice is more like an rational extrapolation of moral instincts in Western cultures.
(Edit: Just realized my description of Rawls could be taken to suggest it in some way resembles "coherant extrapolated volition". I mean no such comparison.)
I can understand why people raised as Catholics would be so immune. But if you're making a decision to convert to Catholicism, presumably you like the whole integrated, no-exceptions theology. Isn't the whole appeal of Catholicism that you're not supposed to partition, and isn't that the element that's supposed to make it "intellectually formidable" as religions go?
To be honest, I doubt that her true rejection matches her stated objections.
For several years, a lot of my friends have been telling me I had an inconsistent and unsustainable philosophy.
Emphasis mine. Her friends are Christian (probably Catholic). They heckle her when she writes atheist material for debates. Her good friend she talks about theology with is a Christian. That's all there is to it.
Humans are still tribal monkeys who follow the customs of their tribe. You put any person around a bunch of Christians (or Buddhists, or Muslims, or Jews), and they'll probably convert. It takes an extremely unusual person to not adopt the religion of their peers, even with all evidence against it.
Nobody says "hmm, according to my understanding of evolutionary theory, group selection wouldn't be a strong enough force to mediate selfish pressures in evolving human moral inclinations, therefore evil is caused by a talking snake." To answer the question directly, you convert any person the same way you change someone's football team, by surrounding them with members of the tribe you want them to be.
Actually, it was more often my atheist friends who made these comments. They told me that you couldn't think about morality as objective or in terms of telos and be an atheist. And then we'd have a fight. (But Jay's right, above, that this was in the context of a philosophical debating group, so being blunt about picking fights was only polite). The Christians tended to hang back more, it was the atheists who were most frustrated by the inconsistencies. Which left me only more determined to reconcile them (if possible) and prove them wrong.
Maybe just asking for explanations is the best bet?
"I don't understand the mechanism by which God could make something right or wrong."
"Even if I accept that God must exist, I don't understand where Jesus enters into things"
"If the Catholics have it right, why don't they do any better than the rest of us ethically?"
"The only evidence you have for God is a feeling that morality must have certain properties. What would constitute evidence for or against your views on morality? And if there is no evidence, why believe one way or the other?"
Pick a bunch of passages about ethics from several sources - the Bible, the Koran, Buddhist writings, secular writings, etc.
Have her read them, but don't tell her which ones are which. Have her write down her thoughts and feelings about each one, whether she thinks they stand up to logical scrutiny. Then after, tell her the sources of them and ask her whether she might reconsider.
Of course, you'd have to select them carefully so that there are no obvious giveaways (e.g. mentioning God), and also you should be careful not to cherrypick sources that make secularism look good and religion look bad.
I remembered how I thought she had a confused conception of meta-ethics and that she often seemed skeptical of reductionism, which in retrospect should have been a major red flag for purported atheists.
From my view, reductionism is the basic question. If someone is right on evolution but wrong on reductionism, that really doesn't buy them much- and I would wonder how deeply they grasp evolution.
As to how to navigate this: suppose that she has a psychological need to profess a belief in some sort of deity, such that she could not fully thrive without professing that belief. Would you want her to be an atheist then? How can you tell if she has that need or not?
Do people here, in general, think it is productive and worthwhile to spend time and energy on deconverting friends and family (provided the religious beliefs in question are mainstream and not threatening to their physical or financial health)?
That's a genuine question (not rhetoric) in case it wasn't clear.
Do people here, in general, think it is productive and worthwhile to spend time and energy on deconverting friends and family (provided the religious beliefs in question are mainstream and not threatening to their physical or financial health)?
Setting out to change other people is almost always going to end poorly. Helping people who have set out to change themselves has a chance of ending well.
When I first read my friend's post, I had a major "I notice that I am confused" moment, because it just seemed so implausible that someone who understood actual atheist arguments (as opposed to dead little sister Hollywood Atheism) could convert to religion, and Catholicism of all things.
I'll rejoin Jack and GLaDOS to say that Catholicism isn't the worst of religions. If I was to convert to a religion it would probably be Catholicism, and I've sometimes semi-seriously played with the idea of checking out the local church - and yes, I understand actual atheist arguments, and no, none of my family is pushing me towards religion.
(A significant part of the attraction of Catholicism is being a contrarian for the sake of it, which is not a very good reason. But there's also a good deal of curiosity, and a feeling that they're pretty good at community. On the minus side, they are responsible for a good deal of anti-epistemology, and of course, God doesn't exist.)
But second, and more immediately, I wonder if anybody has advice on how to handle this, or if they've had similar experiences with their friends. I do care about this person, and I was devastated to hear this news, so if there's something I can do to help her, I want to.
Why are you so convinced this is bad for her? Most people are somewhat religious, and every study I've seen suggests they are just as happy, well-adjusted, and moral as non-religious people. I certainly think it is generally better to believe what is true, but is something like this really worth being devastated about? Can't you just be open-minded about her lifestyle choice?
That is very scary. Leah is a pretty well known atheist blogger. It gives me that "there but for the grace of God go I" feeling.
Does she understand the difference between belief and belief in belief? I helped someone escape an unfortunate re-conversion to religion by ensuring they were clear on this distinction, and challenging them on whether they really believed.
That is very scary. Leah is a pretty well known atheist blogger. It gives me that "there but for the grace of God go I" feeling.
Does she understand the difference between belief and belief in belief?
I sometimes got a desperate vibe from the weekend street-corner preachers when I lived in South Carolina. It's like they were trying so hard, because they wanted so much to believe.
Could there also be a wishful belief in disbelief?
I am observing, for more than a three decades now, how a friend of mine, becomes more and more religious. Catholic. When we met, he was a militant leftist atheists. What was quite a norm under communism we had back then here. If not a norm, then something you can easily expect from a young ambitious teenager. Did I say, he was quite a radical anti theist? I was not very comfortable with his rantings against "fools".
Then it started. He insisted on a work free Christmas day, which we had not under the communists. Then he was outraged by my view, t...
Whenever I used to hear someone make an argument or profess a belief I considered incorrect, I had the tendency to always try to destroy it right when it came up, because most people will be at least somewhat willing to talk about anything that comes up randomly, but will act like you're being annoying or like you care too much if you try to attack one of their beliefs unprovoked. For example, I would think to myself, "This is my chance. Their religious beliefs may never come up again. I must make use of this opportunity."
But then I realized some...
From the bit about feeling like morality 'loved' her, she seems to find the prospect that a deity exists to be a good thing -- whether or not it's true, she seems to find the belief more attractive than I think it should be given the evidence.
It might be worth explaining that it would be really cruel for an extremely powerful being to just stand around and watch evolution happen. Or, say, either of the World Wars. So, if somehow we did find out that a deity existed, we would have very strong evidence that it was unfriendly, not to mention unFriendly.
If the...
One more suggestion: Good and Real proposes a Godless meta-ethics which isn't virtue ethics, but which has parts that might appeal to a virtue ethics fan. So that might be an interesting recommendation.
You asked a question with a real answer, but I think you've asked the wrong question. Setting out with the goal of changing someone is an especially good way to ruin a relationship. It's vastly more essential to learn to value the good in the midst of the bad, because that kind of mixed imperfection is all you will ever find anywhere.
As Catholics are quite specific about, conversion isn't a one-time event. She's in the process of converting, but I've known several people in RCIA who dropped out for one reason or another. And it's sadly true that parish...
Jay, I can certainly empathize with your concern for your friend. However, as a practicing Catholic I can assure you that your friend will not be surrounded by people trying to convince her that she needs to "repent" of her sexuality. There's less that I can say about dark side epistemology (since you would probably consider me to be an adherent of it!) but I can assure you that Leah is not going to have piles of nonsensical doctrine shoved down her throat. She will be introduced to many ideas, but ultimately she herself will decide what to accep...
I must confess that, as an outsider to (but occasional reader of) Less Wrong, I find certain statements and arguments on this site to be just as totalizing and dogmatic as the most dangerous religious fundamentalism.
That seems like a surprising claim! I'd like to explore it further.
The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).
(Note, I'm not asserting that religions or fundamentalisms in general promote those sorts of things. You specifically said "the most dangerous religious fundamentalism", and I'm taking that limitation in good faith.)
Somehow, nobody around here seems to be doing those sort of things. Indeed, that sort of behavior seems to be pretty rare in the Traditional Rationality community too — the skeptics movement; the New Atheists; etc.
Is that just because we are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy instead of about hating and killing them? (I am reminded of a Barry Goldwater quote about extremism and moderation.)
Or do you think there is some other reason?
It looks hyper-skeptical to me! At least when describing everything outside of a communist utopia
I guess the Pope is also skeptical about Buddhist reincarnation.
When observing contemporary social phenomena - from family life to academia - they've historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
If one believes that "everything is a class fight" (I know this is oversimplification), then finding elements of class fight in everything is not an evidence for their skepticism.
Shortly, skepticism does not mean "a belief that your opponents are wrong".
Yes, there are many things wrong with the Church as an institution, but people know this and some are trying to reform these flaws (indeed, if Leah does convert, she will be a great one to do this).
I'm probably an outlier that I find some redeeming qualities in Catholicism precisely in the Church as an institution and not very much worthwhile in the beliefs of regular modern Western Christians.
From a "logical argument" point of view, Vaniver has the right point of view. Reductionism is the key.
From a Dark Arts point of view, reading Leah's post suggests the reason she fell toward Catholicism when she got confused on morality was that she had a bunch of Catholic friends around. Thus being a conspicuously moral (and high-status) atheist will give her an example to fall back to. This isn't too Dark Arts-ish, since you presumably try to be high-status and moral anyway.
It seems, at least, that she understands where the separation of views really occurs:
Based on my in-person arguments to date, it seems like most of my atheist friends disagree two or three steps back from my deciding Morality is actually God. They usually diverge back around the bit where I assert morality, like math, is objective and independent of humans.
As far as Catholicism specifically, she might benefit from reading Elaine Pagels, who discusses at length the historical evidence of the founding of the Catholic Church. Notably, the selection of go...
But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry
Could you expend on what you mean by "bigotry", I've seen that word thrown around to shut down debates way too much.
For example, from the above post some might conclude that you are an anti-Catholic bigot, depending on the definition of "bigotry" being used they might well be right.
I think a little more context is in order, Jay. A quite conservative Catholic speaker was coming to our alma mater and people were protesting and staging a kiss-in + walk-out at his talk. But no one was spending much time rebutting his argument, and I feel pretty strongly if you're going to disrupt a talk, you owe the people who are coming a cogent explanation of why.
So I invited a friend to summarize and pitch the speaker's ideas on my blog and then I rebutted, so that there'd be a discussion and reference to go with the protest. And Gerken (my interlocutor) is intelligent and was writing with the best of intentions. I disagreed with a lot of his points (even within a Catholic framework) but that's not a refutation of his sincerity.
During the discussion, he prodded me on where I thought moral law came from in my metaphysics. I talked about morality as though it were some kind of Platonic form, remote from the plane that humans existed on. He wanted to know where the connection was.
I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth.
Presumably asking her to clarify her belief that Morality = Person, and discussing other options for Morality and why they do not make sense ...
"You don't use your mind to think about religion." - J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, Church of the SubGenius.
The question you asked is how to convince your friend not to become a Catholic. That's the question I'll answer, but it's the wrong question for you to ask.
The Episcopalian faith has much of the content and structure of the Catholic faith, but it is (I hear) more accommodating to women and to non-straight people. Perhaps this might be a better fit for your friend.
The blogger behind ravingatheist.com became a Christian. To his or her credit...
Do you know anything about what sort of Catholic she's becoming? There's a wide range within the religion, though I've heard that converts are apt to take the religion more literally.
If she's one of those "there's a real Catholicism, and it isn't the hierarchy" people, then she might not be under as much pressure about her sexuality as you fear.
NOTE ON USAGE: I mean by "theist" only a believer in some sort of god, as opposed to an "atheist."
As far as jumping to Catholicism, even if you ding her on the implausible authoritarianism of infallibility and her apparent disagreement over sexual ethics, all you are arguing for is to move her from Roman Catholic to Anglican.
I personally do not attempt to convert people away from Catholicism or pretty much anything else unless they ask me to or they initiate a discussion with me. I have numerous discussions with my Catholic father, b...
"she felt like morality "loved" her."
Maybe you can explain to her that internal constructs can feel like external entities.
also from reading her blog post I got the impression rationality was a limit on her ability to choose her beliefs in this area rather than her means for doing so
"I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true."
Also this, "until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber" makes it sound like she is a...
From what I've heard, the (Catholic, at least) Church view on sexuality is derived mostly from Aristotle.
The world looks pretty scary when we try and look at it as it really is. As much as we try to account for it, at some level we are a function of that which we observe and take in- from that viewpoint, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where the information you take in becomes skewed along lines that don't mach up with reality. Given enough skewed data, we all make choices that appear irrational from other eyes.
Sadly, none of us rank information told us once as highly as information we "discover" for ourselves. I don't know if the convers...
[Executive summary: solve the underlying causes of your problem by becoming Pope]
I think it's a mistake to focus too much on the case of one particular convert to Catholicism simply because you know her personally. To do that is to fall prey to the availability heuristic.
The root cause of your problem with your friend is that the Catholic Church exists as a powerful and influential organisation which continues to promote its weird dogma, polluting Leah's mind along with millions of others. Before investing time and effort trying to flip her back to the side of reason, you should consider whether you could destroy the Church and dam the river of poison at its source. I will now outline a metho
It probably won't lead to the bottom line she's already seemed to have drawn, but I can share a bunch of material from my ethics class (which is very much science-based, and has a lot of good videos and literature to read). I'm only 1/3 done with the class, but to the degree that it wipes everything away and starts from scratch, I feel that it could only help a person on their journey of understanding ethics.
Let me know if you're interested.
The fully general argument against supernatural belief is physicalism/reductionism. The fully general argument against omnipotent/omnibenevolent beings in our local space is anti-panglossianism, ie fun theory. Pick one.
That said, when someone starts arguing that it's impossible to derive ought-from-is, and therefore we need God to ground morality, I always want to ask if it isn't a bit suspect that they just derived is-from-ought.
People in general rarely do things for rational, sensible, truth-based reasons. So generally, if I really want someone to do or think something, I manipuate them into it. Of course, this may harm your friendship (if you get caught) or damage the person (if you are not apt at such things) or it may run against your personal ethics. None of these are bad reasons to refrain, but if what you really want is her deconversion, you already want to manipulate her and might as well use effective tools (rhetoric, emotional blackmail, cognitive biases, reputation/shaming... whatever suits you) rather than less effective means such as facts, evidence, or logical reasoning.
Hate to be self-promoting, but I just wrote a blog post on this that you might find useful.
Given that conversions tend to be driven by people's personal connections, probably realistically the best thing you can do to stop something like this (at least in the future) is get someone a good support network of non-believing friends.
Though that's probably not what I'd do in your situation. I'd be screaming at hear that the Catholic church is evil and if she must be religious, why can't she be a nice Episcopalian or something? Which is kinda what I do in my blo...
Orthodox Church is strictly more probable than Catholic Church regarding truthness of dogma. ETA: assuming that both probabilities are greater than zero.
Religion is politics. Politics is the mind-killer. Arguably we should discourage overtly political discussion on LessWrong.
Religion is politics. Politics is the mind-killer. Arguably we should discourage overtly political discussion on LessWrong.
Does this apply to people who advocate religion as well as those who are mourning a conversion?
Yes, I am calling Will a hypocrite. The majority of of religious discussions raised on Lesswrong in recent months have been by Will. That being the case I interpret the parent as a purely political comment: "This post supports the opposing side. Argue against it!"
I recently learned that a friend of mine, and a long-time atheist (and atheist blogger), is planning to convert to Catholicism. It seems the impetus for her conversion was increasing frustration that she had no good naturalistic account for objective morality in the form of virtue ethics; that upon reflection, she decided she felt like morality "loved" her; that this feeling implied God; and that she had sufficient "if God, then Catholicism" priors to point toward Catholicism, even though she's bisexual (!) and purports to still feel uncertain about the Church's views on sexuality. (Side note: all of this information is material she's blogged about herself, so it's not as if I'm sharing personal details she would prefer to be kept private.)
First, I want to state the rationality lesson I learned from this episode: atheists who spend a great deal of their time analyzing and even critiquing the views of a particular religion are at-risk atheists. Eliezer's spoken about this sort of issue before ("Someone who spends all day thinking about whether the Trinity does or does not exist, rather than Allah or Thor or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is more than halfway to Christianity."), but I guess it took a personal experience to really drive the point home. When I first read my friend's post, I had a major "I notice that I am confused" moment, because it just seemed so implausible that someone who understood actual atheist arguments (as opposed to dead little sister Hollywood Atheism) could convert to religion, and Catholicism of all things. I seriously considered (and investigated) the possibility that her post was some kind of prank or experiment or otherwise not sincere, or that her account had been hijacked by a very good impersonator (both of these seem quite unlikely at this point).
But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry and how often I thought she was taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah. I remembered how I thought she had a confused conception of meta-ethics and that she often seemed skeptical of reductionism, which in retrospect should have been a major red flag for purported atheists. So yeah, spending all your time arguing about Catholic doctrine really is a warning sign, no matter how strongly you seem to champion the "atheist" side of the debate. Seriously.
But second, and more immediately, I wonder if anybody has advice on how to handle this, or if they've had similar experiences with their friends. I do care about this person, and I was devastated to hear this news, so if there's something I can do to help her, I want to. Of course, I would prefer most that she stop worrying about religion entirely and just grok the math that makes religious hypotheses so unlikely as to not be worth your time. But in the short term I'd settle for her not becoming a Catholic, and not immersing herself further in Dark Side Epistemology or surrounding herself with people trying to convince her that she needs to "repent" of her sexuality.
I think I have a pretty good understanding of the theoretical concepts at stake here, but I'm not sure where to start or what style of argument is likely to have the best effect at this point. My tentative plan is to express my concern, try to get more information about what she's thinking, and get a dialogue going (I expect she'll be open to this), but I wanted to see if you all had more specific suggestions, especially if you've been through similar experiences yourself. Thanks!