Have you looked around to see if someone has developed the same idea before? This sounds a lot like something a devout theist would write, in order to spread an effective straw-man for anti-theist rationalists (kind of like a reverse Dan Brown).
Which is, incidentally, the same reason I strongly hope your project fails utterly and completely.
Well of course one has to be careful not to play into the theist's hands. Which is why it'll be obvious that the characters are flawed. It really should be obvious from the fact that they make concrete plans to kill people…
Theists will see them as perfect examples of the typical evil rationalists, but there's really nothing I could do against that. (Even if it were made very clear in the film, they would just re-edit it…). So I don't care about that much.
As to your hope of failure, it probably will (mostly because I'm a rubbish writer, don't know any passable actors, and don't have any money)
Two teens in Salt Lake City have abandoned their Mormon heritage, turning to punk-rock and nihilism after being orphaned.
They resolve to help others who may be trapped in religious upbringings by undermining current religious institutions. They decide on the Catholic church as their target. Being teenage punks, their null hypothesis is violence, and decide to assassinate the pope. However they have also seen the evil overlord list and are exposed along the way to TVTropes. They begin taking the idea of rationality further, and as the series progresses develop more nuanced positions and complex plans.
For example, they decide that military technology would be more effective than assassination by hand, but being unwilling to join the draft they enroll in the University of Utah to study mechanical engineering. They are introduced to a military scientist who is in the process of disarming missiles to comply with a new nuclear weapons treaty with Russia. After several crackpot plans, they decide that becoming friends is the best way to discover whether he can help them.
As time goes on they get more conservative in their actions, though they continue to conspire about assassinating the pope. By the end of the series they have transitioned into high-paying technical jobs and give their money to an effective professionally run charity, feeling confident that the pope will "die of a heart attack before we get around to it anyway."
It would be wrong to publicly offer correct advice on what a rational person would do to further such an evil goal, even in the context of fiction. You don't want crazy people to watch your film and learn how to do this sort of thing correctly.
It's something of a SOP in fiction to describe harmful actions in a way that sounds correct, and for the most part is, but tweaking enough key details that if someone tried to imitate the fiction in real life they would fail, and ideally have a lot of trouble figuring out why they failed.
E.G. give a long, engineering-porn type description of the improvised bomb your heroes successfully use, but tweak a few chemical ratios so that in reality the bomb wouldn't explode (or would explode in the wannabe bomber's hands).
Or you could explain how to get away with murder, in such a way that anyone who commits a murder thinking they could use this method to get away with it would end up leaving a certain kind of evidence, so they would still be caught.
Oh, wait, there is something wrong with that plan.
Fiction would, however, be an excellent place for cautionary examples of getting it badly wrong.
That's what I'm aiming at. They only believe to be rational, when in fact they are as ideological and misguided as everybody else, although not as obvious. That's mostly owed to the fact that they're only two people, since the risk increases with every conspirator they would add. So they form an echo-chamber of their own, eventually spiraling off…
I'm outlining some posts on memetic infections which might be highly apposite. This may be extremely good for ideas too - statistically, jihadis tend to be engineers and appear to have decompartmentalised badly. (Making your protagonists engineers? See also RW: Engineers and woo - most engineers are perfectly normal geeks, but there's a long and venerable history of engineers turning into complete cranks about non-engineering matters.)
How would you build your rationalist assassin group?
To fit with exactly what you have up there, I see two options.
1) irrationality combined with extreme stupidity.
2) even more extreme stupidity.
I suppose you could hide the extreme stupidity under the "just smart enough to be dangerous to themselves" trope, but that still requires irrationality, which is what you've defined them to not want.
Probably better to abandon their aspiration to rationality and just make them clever extremists who desperately want to convince the world of their sanity. By not focusing on rationality you can get the viewer to also not focus on it.
So they are supposed to be failed rationalists? It seems preposterous to think that killing some people would be enough to bring down the Catholic Church.
yes, basically.
The distribution of their videos is supposed to spread it though, they hope to create a movement so no future church official could be save etc. Their discussions about if this would even make any sense and trying to find out who really holds power in the church (& the weak points), and if there is even a way to commit a "perfect assassination" of such high profile targets, would be the series.
They waver though. Through failed argument they arrive at a point where they think it's a good idea to plan their assassinations. The discussions about ethics and how they could actually execute their plan in a way that really increases well-being (they think there is a way to do it), i.e. without ending up with the theists uniting and rationalists outlawed. Their ultimate goal is getting rid of supernaturalism and especially using it for oppression (which would be good, I think most would agree). Having read about ethics a bit though, they come to the conclusion that killing some people would be outweighed by the danger to the future of humanity their victims pose.
They could consider deception, too. Stage a high-level hidden religious war, more focused than current religious terrorism, in the hope that society would blame religion if they see that all religions are guilty etc.
This is litterally the worst idea I have ever heard. DO NOT MAKE THIS! This plays so very thouroghly into the hands of the thiests that it's not even funny. You are either an idiot, or a thiest trying to undermine rationality. Please, make no further posts.
Fredo and Pidjin are close, and they even kill the pope.
(and by "close", I mean "have some superficial similarities even if they're completely played for laughs and feature no attempt to depth or explanation of motives, but it's a good pretext to post comic with the pope".)
Hi,
I'm currently developing a web-series based around two people who call themselves rationalists, planning to assassinate people in order to bring down the catholic church.
So my fixpoints are that they need sound, or at least compelling, rational argument to justify killing people for "the greater good" (because they are sure the church works very strongly against that). Also, since it'll be the style of the series, they document themselves while planning their actions. They post encrypted versions of their videos and all data used online and have a mechanism for releasing the keys in case they are caught. Being rational, they know that they will be caught eventually and want to get "their method" out there, hoping to set off some kind of "non-ideological revolution". Although they know it will probably end badly for them, they are as careful as possible, while trying to not be overly paranoid since it my affect their performance.
Of course they are biased, since they first had the idea of killing the pope, and then they thought of doing so "rationally". They do see their bias here, though, and try to work around it a bit, but they must come out on the side of pursuing their plans (or the series ends).
There won't be a real "message" to the series, although they need to make some quite obvious false assumptions (and some personal bias, too, no fridge-stuffing, but rather they are more ideological than they know, in that born-again christian-become-atheist kind of way, occasionally not understanding the difference between what the basic axioms are, and what dogmas are. Also some bipolar disorder and depression might come in handy), so nobody will get stupid ideas. Also I don't want to be persecuted for providing terror-manuals.
Let me rephrase that: Starting out as a (sloppy) rationalist, what logical fallacies do you have to trip in order to end up on a position that would endorse terrorism?