each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
This seems like an extremely strong statement and thus hardly believable. Many people would dearly love to discover such powerful secrets. Feel free to share an example or two.
It's very believable. I'll give a couple of techniques here.
Reinforce skeptical behavior while modifying their self-image to that of a truth-seeker: "I love talking to you because you pursue the truth over comforting lies". Be genuine, and by that I mean use the tone you would use to tell someone that their suit looks good.
Give high-status cues. Assume the role of teacher or mentor. Once they want to become more like you, merely expressing your beliefs (not opposing theirs, but expressing yours) will make a significant impact.
Demonstrate that giving up religious belief won't result in isolation. How exactly you do this will vary based on the social context.
There are a couple others, such as generating low-status associations with religion, which is a bit advanced and so not worth covering here, and creating false memories and comittments, which is scarily easy to do but absolutely dark arts and therefore not covered here.
You will note the absence of "rational argument" on this list. That's because rational argument is rather ineffective for changing the mind of the person you are arguing with (though it may change the views of observers).
I'm going to describe such a conversation (the first of what would, I think, be many) for a girl who I will call Jane, though that is not her name. Some background: Jane is a devout Catholic, an altar girl, a theology major, a performer of the singing-acting-dancing type, and one of the bubbliest people I know. She is also firmly against gay marriage, abortion, premarital sex, and consumption of alcohol or other drugs (though for some reason she has no problem with consumption of shellfish). You may have read the previous two sentences and thought "there's a lot of sexual repression going on there" and you would be quite correct, though she would never admit that. Here is what I would say and do. Don't take the wording too literally; I'm not that good.
tld: (At an appropriate moment) Jane, I have a very personal question for you.
J: Okay, shoot.
tld: It's about God.
J: Oh dear. I'm listening.
tld: So God exists. And he's up there, somewhere, shouting down that he loves us. But if tomorrow morning he suddenly vanished - just ceased to exist, packed up and left town, whatever - would you want to know?
J: I - uh - gosh. That would go against everything God's said, about how he wou...
This.. reads to me like a Chick tract more than anything else. I just don't believe J will be that easy to manipulate.
Unless J is much, much less intelligent than you, or you've spent a lot of time planning different scenarios, it seems like any one of J's answers might well require too much thought for a quick response. For example,
tld: Well, God was there, and now he's left that world behind. So it's a world without God - what changes, what would be different about the world if God weren't in it?
J: I can't imagine a world without God in it.
Lots of theists might answer this in a much more specific fashion. "Well, I suppose the world would cease to exist, wouldn't it?", "Anything could happen, since God wouldn't be holding it together anymore!", or "People would all turn evil immediately, since God is the source of conscience." all seem like plausible responses. "I can't imagine a world without God in it" might literally be true, but even if it is, J's response might be something entirely different, or even something that isn't really even a response to the question (try writing down a real-life conversation some time, without cleaning it up into what was really meant. People you know probably very often say things that are both surprising and utterly pointless).
I didn't even go to Catholic school, but in the process of Confirmation I learned enough apologetics to deflect or reject or just willfully not understand most of these.
A Good Catholic will tell you that the universe could not exist without God, and/or that nothing good can exist without God, so if there were no God, there would either be no universe, or the universe would be hell.
It would sort of be like me trying to convince you quantum physics is wrong and starting out by saying, "Imagine a world without quantum physics." You have nothing with which to substitute quantum physics. Your mind returns a divide by zero error.
Additionally, religious folks in general tend to claim to believe that morality comes from God. And when they say this, they really truly mean that if there were no God, there would be no morality. That the fact that morality exists is a kind of proof that God exists. I am not making this up. I have been told by a religious person that, if they were to learn that God did not exist, they would immediately embark upon an orgy of murder and theft, because, "There would be no reason not to." They believe this about themselves despite the fact that we know it to be a misunderstanding of psychology. I am not saying all religious people have exactly this glitch, but I am trying to emphasize that your friend(s) probably don't have the cognitive algorithms in place to even comprehend these questions the way you mean them.
I think you (and most commenters) are treating this hypothetical believer in a rather disrespectful and patronizing fashion. I would think the ethical thing to do is to engage in a meta-discussion with such a person and see whether there are certain subjects that are off limits, how they feel about your differing views on God, how they would feel about losing their faith, etc. They might ask you similar questions about what might make you become a believer. You might find yourself incorrect about what might make them lose their belief.
It's certainly possible to remain in a religious community without one's faith intact -- I think it happens to a large percentage of people in any religious group. Consider all the European Catholics who are essentially atheists.
In fact I have attempted such meta-discussion. Unfortunately it's very difficult to get a straight answer to questions like that; people will almost always CLAIM to care about the truth, but that's also what they would claim if they merely thought they cared and didn't reflect enough on it to know otherwise.
The possibility that I am incorrect about what would make them lose their belief is a very real one; I used to think that merely repeating the things that broke MY faith in God would work on everyone, and that was clearly wrong. Still, I'd give p>.33 for success, and thus expect it to work on at least one of the three people I'm writing about.
Be honest (i.e. don't pretend to believe what you don't believe), don't be rude, don't be obnoxious and apart from that don't think too much about it. There will be both positive and negative consequences of whatever you tell the believers, the extent thereof you could hardly predict. If they want to discuss religion with a skeptic, let them take the responsibility to do so. If they don't, respect their choice.
Some ethically relevant questions you could ask yourself:
If you deconvert your friend, do you predict they'll thank you for it afterward or express regret at losing their faith?
Would you approve of your more adept friends pushing analogous levers in your own head? (For example, I welcome people to cause me to doubt my preconceptions, but I don't want people to use my fears to manipulate me.)
It really depends on your own personal moral system (assuming ethical relativism). In order to answer your question, I would need to know what you consider moral. I'll attempt to infer your morals from your post, and then I'll try to answer your question accordingly.
It sounds from your post like you're torn between two alternatives, both of which you consider moral, but which are mutually exclusive. On one hand, it seems that you're morally devoted to the causes of atheism and truth-seeking; thus, you desire to convert others to this cause. But on the other hand, you're morally devoted to your friends' happiness, and you realize that if they do become atheists, then they will lose their social grounding (not to mention the emotional benefits they receive from being religious).
It sounds like you're very devoted to truth-seeking, and that you believe atheism to be the truth. (Side-note: as a Bayesian, I distrust anyone who claims to know "the truth". The point of Bayesianism is that we don't know the truth; all we have are probabilities, and thus we can approach the truth but never attain it.) Anyway, given your devotion to truth-seeking, I would expect you to want t...
If you deconvert your friends using Dark Arts-ish methods, but you don't teach them the virtues of truth-seeking, then atheism will become just another religion to them, handed down by new authority figures.
Exactly this. Let's do something better than just authority figures walking around, each one trying to convert people by Dark Arts. Try to find something that is above "my faith vs. your faith".
What I usually do is express that although I consider all religions elaborate fairy tales, in my opinion there is no big harm in believing anything, as far as the religion does not make one do crazy things, such as murdering people who disagree with them. Therefore I don't even try to convert people. (I just make it obvious that their attempts to convert me are futile. If necessary, I listen to their arguments, and they just say that they don't seem very impressive to me.)
For an average person, being religious is really not a big cost; there are probably other things in their life which harm them more. For example, the greatest cost in my opinion, wasting one's Sundays in church, is comparable by wasting time procrastinating online. Limitations in sexual life because of faith...
Heavens, no. I want my friends to be atheists for purely selfish reasons. It so happens that some of those selfish reasons involve things like "I want my friends to know what's true", but most of them are reasons like "I want this awkward piece of the relationship gone" and "It's a shame none of you believe in casual premarital sex, because I could really go for an orgy right now" and "If I have to hear you talk about how wrong gay marriage is ONE MORE TIME I do declare I shall explode."
In other words, I really do not trust my personal desires as an ethical system, because in a vacuum I'm a pretty unmitigated asshole.
The "Dark Arts-ish levers" are what make this situation interesting. If it were merely a matter of telling the truth, virtually every ethical theory would come out in favor of telling the truth. But having access to such levers is "Here, let me make this choice for you" and that puts you in murky ethical territory.
Some conditional answers from various points of view:
If pulling the lever makes the world rank higher according to your preferences, then pull it.
If both you and they would be better off if you pulled the lever, then pull it...
If the lever, aside from being a metaphorical lever, is also attached to a very large nuclear explosive.
This is something I think about a lot. We all know pure rhetoric is never going to deconvert someone, but a combination of "dark arts", emotional vulnerability, and personal connection seems a likely recipe.
A quick summation of how I feel about religiosity: I hate the belief, but love the believer. I went through a long and painful deconversion process, so I can empathize with them. I know that religious people struggle with doubt and are probably terrified by the prospect of losing their faith. I've had the chance to go for the throat (so to sp...
And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
Have you tried this? I've talked a number of people out of theism before, but even after observing and following deconversion extensively, I could never manage, nor would I expect, to be able to change the beliefs of most theists, using any of the persuasive techniques available to me.
You can't change everyone's minds. You won't, in all probability, manage to do so, even if you try. You will, of course, alienate yourself to everyone you try and fail with. If someone wants to discuss faith in a genuine way, it seems reasonable to argue with them. But I don't see the benefit in evangelising at people.
I am perhaps less optimistic than you on the probability that you can really deconvert theists by "unflipping DA levers in their heads"; but I'm positively absolutist on the desirability of doing so. The Dark Side is called 'Dark' for a reason. Where you see it operating, you have a positive moral duty to fight it if you can.
I can think of one situation where pulling the levers would be more 'good' than 'bad'.
Estimate each of their future influence on others - both span and depth. If you consider it 'high', then pull the lever. If you consider it 'low' (which might further correlate with lower IQ), then (tentatively) hold off.
One concern is whether the newly-minted atheist will subsequently prove to emself that black is white, and be killed in the next zebra crossing, as Douglas Adams put it.
For instance, if Alice is so taken with her newfound freedom from faith that she boasts loudly about it and gets herself disowned, expelled, and otherwise disadvantaged, that would kind of suck.
(I'm writing this before reading the comments) I to have a similar situation ,with my peers(public school though).
It sounds like you're going for a snap sort of break if it really seems the way to you I'd recommended finding which peers have been through social trauma first and 'break' them.
I'm attempting to 'break' my younger sister (who is the only one in her house who regularly attends church) and I'm succeeding. But, I'm going slowly and i intend to let her finally decided after being brought to the edge.
I'm not sure if this is precisely the correct forum for this, but if there is a better place, I don't know what it would be. At any rate...
I'm a student a Catholic university, and there are (as one might surmise) quite a lot of Catholics here, along with assorted other theists (yes, even some in the biology faculty). For this reason, I find myself acquiring more and more devoutly Catholic friends, and some of them I have grown quite close to. But the God issue keeps coming up for one reason or another, which is a source of tension. And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
So the question is this: in what situations (if any) is it ethical to push such buttons? We often say, here, that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but these are people who have built their lives around faith, people for whom the Church is their social support group. If it were possible to disillusion the whole world all at once, that'd be one thing - but in this case my options are limited to changing the minds of only the specific individuals I have spent time getting to know, and the direct result would be their alienation from the entire community in which they've been raised.
And yet it is the truth.
I'm conflicted. LessWrong, what is your opinion?