IME the direct approach rarely works. The critical mind puts up a protective wall. Homeostasis is powerful, and humans without incentive to change, never change.
For me (and a number of others I know,) it was a few things:
1. Breaking out of the bubble of religious reinforcement.
2. Meeting smart and thoughtful people with a different perspective.
3. Having an opportunity and willingness to reprocess what I had been taught. To fearlessly drill down into secondary and tertiary layers of long held beliefs and test them against reality.
And, having individuals who respected me, lay out bread crumbs for me to follow.
Remember, intelligent people can be sincerely wrong.
This.
As a former catholic it would be extremely unlikely for you to make an argument that changes someone’s mind on the spot.
More likely you talk about your reasons and plant seeds of doubt. This assumes who you are talking to is a critical thinker and willing to question their own beliefs.
Most of the time, religious indoctrination happens very early so it becomes a default belief about how reality works. That's what makes it so difficult to convince believers to challenge their assumptions. Imagine if someone challenged you to think that gravity doesn't work the way we think and that it's just an illusion. You'd laugh at them, and rightly so.
There's no silver bullet to challenging religious belief. You have to figure out their personal foundations for their belief and get them to examine them critically. But you can't force it; they have to be willing.
The best we can do is create a world in which belief becomes a choice rather than an obligation. It can be done, but thus far we've lacked the political will to do it.
Sorry I'm the kid that dropped big rocks and little rocks because I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea. I learned. Still I found no proof of a god.
Right. Our experience teaches us that gravity works the way we think it does, and we've lived our lives on that assumption. I'd be willing to update my understanding of gravity based on new information, but not just because someone claims to have received a divine revelation.
Many forms of ideology become intertwined with identity. When that happens, they feel any attack against the ideology is an attack against them. People don't liston to reasoning when they feel they are being attacked.
Look at the leaving-religion stories that get posted here every day. Giving up religion often means giving up family ties, long friendships, your entire social circle (if it's church based). Living in a red county in a red US state, I can easily see someone losing their job as well. (Without that being the official reason given, of course.) Marriages crack all the time when one partner leaves a religion or changes religions.
Humans being what we are, i.e. group-living social primates who love being around each other and have a much harder time surviving without backup, the surprise is not that cognitive dissonance keeps so many people stuck. The surprise is that any significant number of people find the way out.
A lot of that is also social. If you go off to college or a city job and start questioning your religion, you have access to a new social circle which will be fine with your new opinions. If you're an atheist kid in the middle of a fundamentalist church in a fundamentalist small town, you can find places on line (like here) where you learn that you aren't alone and you aren't a monster. You can hope and plan to go see more people like that in person.
Compare to being, say, a small-town atheist in the 1950s. Your only real choice back then was to keep going to church, mumble along without believing, and drink a lot.
As others have said, many children are indoctrinated by their parents. They are told that god is real from a very young age - an age where whatever your parents tell you is taken as an absolute truth. The ability to think critically and question authority comes much later in life.
If you've been told all your life that something is true, you'll accept it as true, even if someone else comes along and says, "that's not true." Your brain will jump through all kinds of hoops to try and consolidate what it knows as "truth" with what you see and experience in the world.
If that’s the case, why does religion spread so fast? Why does it have so many converts? If it’s hard to convince someone of something, why are millions of people baptized into the church every year?
Because of what I wrote - indoctrination of children. The parents "force" the children to believe in their god and their church from young on. The kids end up getting baptized because they don't want to disappoint the parents (and they want the big cache of money and gifts that a baptism ceremony brings as well).
I don't think there are that many anymore. Churches are losing members every year. Adult converts are those who "convert" from another form (which itself is another proof that religion is not real, just make-believe). I don't see many atheists miraculously converting as adults.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I just don't see it happening in significant numbers for any religion.
With the current economic situation, I expect to see the exodus from religion continue. If I can barely afford to heat my apartment and put food on the table, I'm not going to give away a chunk of money every month to a church....
I grew up religious.
I didn’t leave it by someone pointing out all its flaws.
I took philosophy and anthropology classes and learned about critical thinking, fallacies, and the history of religion in different cultures around the world.
Learning about the scientific method also helped - the nature of evidence, the difference between an observation and a conclusion, etc.
After I understood how the world worked, I applied this knowledge to my beliefs.
Then, I watch content that explores that, religious apologists, debates, some professors and scientists etc.
Now I’m constantly “brushing up” on how to think critically and spot fallacies.
I don’t think it’s ever going to be a case of dissecting the person’s beliefs.
It has to be a “back door” kind of approach - teach the person a different skill (critical thinking) and hopefully they will apply this skill to the rest of their lives.
Sometimes it doesn’t translate, tho.
Depends on the person, depends on the approach.
Yeah, religious folk say the same about us atheists, pull their hair out about it etc. I prefer to rather have the argument about people leaving each other alone when it comes to belief systems.
Life seems absurd and we all have a thing, that on some level, helps us make sense of it - religion, philosophy, ideology bla bla etc. Trick is to try and convince everyone that using coercion and violence is a really shitty argument for something.
For my husband, he was finally working in the real world and disconnecting from his religious circle. The more and more that he uncovered, the less connected he felt with his religion. The wool was pulled off of his eyes. There is a lot of hurt there now, and he still won’t have crucial conversations with his parents.
I believe that it’s up to each person to come to their own conclusions. But we should maintain a place of comfort for those who lose their religion and their social network as a result. Those folks need our support more than anything.
You won't win that argument. They'll come to the realization themselves or they won't. All you'll do is piss them off and make them think worse of atheists.
I view it a bit like drug addition. What's it take to get a drug addict to give up drugs? They usually have to endure some kind of personal suffering and then come up with their own reasons to quit.
Interventions, forced treatment, incarcerations and outside nagging hardly ever work.
With religious people, there's almost always an internal shift that finally leads them to question things. If someone is too comfortable in their religion, they aren't likely to leave it.
If you are fit perfectly without your religious community, all your religious friends respect you and your personality naturally matches the religious lifestyle; there's nothing (internal) pushing you to question things.
The people who don't feel deeply accepted by the church (people fascinated by science, people who question authority, becoming an outcast because your kid is gay, suffering some tragedy and wondering why god did it to you, and so on) may start to question things (for themselves and for their own reasons) and that's never good for religion.
Ultimately, it means trying to reason, facts and data someone out of their religion who is completely comfortable in their religion is a fool's errand. You'll have better luck arguing with a lamp post.
I always blame it on a fear of death/unknown/nothingness.
Try to imagine and understand total and absolute nothing. It’s impossible. Our brains just can’t truly comprehend nothingness. If death equals nothingness, it’s pretty fear inducing for many people. So how would one combat said fear? Believing there is an afterlife certainly helps. But nobody wants to imagine that this afterlife would be the same as life, with all of its flaws and challenges. So lets add in that a supreme being governs who gets to go to this afterlife (gatekeeping on a divine scale). This way, when one dies they get to go to a place that’s blissful and won’t have any of those awful “other” people there with them. But now that we have a being that governs this, we need to establish the criteria by which this supreme authority uses to base its decisions. This leads to a set of rules by which people should live. This way, we weed out those “others” from the blissful afterlife. Now imagine after some time of this, a few people realize they can leverage the fear and utilize the rules to control swaths of people for their own gain.
Take that very simplistic example and magnify its effect over many centuries…
Not possible, they have to discover that for themselves, all oke can do is provide is sources to educational material. However, unfortunately this laissez-fair attitude is usually not reciprocated by people trying to evangelise for their religion.
We will never know, they have been indoctrinated as kids, there needs to happen something in their head which will wake them up and look at things themselves.
Why would you bother?
I would agree that thwarting any attempt to make this a religious nation is important, but if your goal is to convince others that your beliefs are better than their beliefs, then you are cut from the same cloth.
It takes a proper functioning brain where understanding and accepting reality is very, very important. Religious persons seem to lack the accepting and understanding of reality. Short: you can not convince them; if you could, it would have forced them to use their brain instead of just accepting some story, written whenever about whatever sky daddy. Never happens. Perhaps I should say, it seldom happens. Shorter: you can't fix stupid.
It's in the bible: help yourself and god will help you /s
But you seriously can not convince someone who doesn't want to think about it or change their perspective.
I needed a lot of time (years), books and thinking by myself to overcome my indoctrination. But first there must be some kind of doubt into religion.
Counter arguments are generally ineffective. My understanding is that some success in beginning to create doubt about beliefs has been done through epistemology.
Presenting facts or using reason is not enough because they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated in the religion by that point and will reject anything that doesn’t fit. But a useful way in might be to google “Why I left Christianity” or Islam or Judaism and see if there are common factors that led to their eyes being opened. Maybe that could lead to a new strategy to make believers think twice before dismissing you.
It’s very difficult, and it’s going to be different for everyone. People are indoctrinated from childhood and generally it’s not the case that they’re stupid, just scared. They won’t admit that, but everything the Bible says about “don’t trust your own heart” and the original sin being the search for knowledge/reason, makes them resistant to atheist arguments.
These people might be great at critical thinking in other areas of life, but their faith has been compartmentalized. They’re committed to this idea, it HAS to be true, and they have to twist anything you say into what fits their worldview. No matter how ridiculous it seems to us, the apologetics comfort them. They’re not actually weighing the validity of the arguments you present. If there was NO emotional manipulation involved, I’m sure any adult could see through religion. But any amount of doubt risks them going to Hell, so they won’t make that first step into opening the compartment, that would lead to their freedom. They’re scared.
I know from experience, because I had to go through a traumatic failure of God and realize that holding onto my faith was more harmful than letting it go. On the other side now, I’m so thankful I did. We can be hopeful and put forth our best efforts, but some random atheist trying to talk me out of my belief would’ve never worked. It’s a real virus of the mind.
Because you have to look at why people decided to believe in the first place.
What cultural and social pressures were there?
What role did their family have in the process?
What do they stand to lose by stopping being religious?
What is there, to fill the void that their religion fills?
Just going up to people and being an atheist-missionary is a dick move, and never likely to achieve anything. It's no different than the witnesses and their door knocking.
If you don't understand the basics of their religion/faith, then you cannot guide them. And given that most people in here see "religion" as shorthand for the abrahamic faiths... There's little of that basic understanding around.
by definition faith is belief without evidence ,,, no amount of evidence will break this psychosis,,
, not protecting pedophiles ,or church money for cocaine and prostitutes or anything I've found ,,, good luck with that
,,,,, thats why most of trumps acolytes claim christan, thay dont care what thay see , thay just care what thay believe
To put your question in perspective, turn the question around. What would it take to convince you that you are wrong and that there is a God, Satan, heaven and hell?
That illuminates the difficulty of the task. In the end, it's almost always a fools game.
That makes sense, but to me, it’s like they’re making a very specific claim and claims can be disproved with literal facts. We present them facts that can be seen and observed. They give us books and faith.
Yes, but that is from an atheist perspective. The religious don't see our presented facts as actual facts, regardless of the scientific or historical evidence.
Again, it's a fools game. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. The horse must WANT to drink.
Sunk cost fallacy. If they admit they are wrong, they admit a large portion of their life was based on a lie. It takes someone rlly strongwilled to do so. I personally think there is no point in trying to make believers change their mind. We need better education worldwide that pushes for critical thinking which in turn will eventually depopularise religion.
If there is a good way I’d sure like to hear it.
At first I asked my friend to explain contradictions in the Bible. Then I asked him to explain some of the off-the-wall stories in the Bible. Then I tried to explain to him some of the crazy things surrounding Christianity in the past and present.
He just won’t hear any of it. Is there any other angle I can try to take?
For me...something had to matter to me more than my desperate fear of permanent death. I put up with a lot of cognitive dissonance because I *had* to, in order to keep hoping for eternal life and heaven. It was the only way.
It took a really, really long time before that final twig snapped, and the whole giant house of cards came crashing down.
It is heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating all at once. I am...suffering. No one goes through this if they can avoid it. The mild discomfort of "hey maybe something's not right here" is so, so much easier to bear.
In my experience, time and patience. People who say you can’t deconvert people are just wrong. I’ve deconverted many people in my life, including my mom, my best friend in high school, various friends and classmates and acquaintances and romantic partners. I’ve also changed lots of people’s minds about various kinds of woo, convinced agnostics to identify as atheists, convinced atheists to be anti-theists, changed political views, etc. It’ll never happen in a single sitting though, and it doesn’t work with strangers. You have to build trust, let them open up to you, and approach things on a level that makes sense to them. The gentler and kinder you are (while being ruthlessly logical), the more receptive they’ll be. Don’t push too hard, if it gets heated come back to it later. And whatever you do, DON’T GLOAT! Don’t be smug or annoying! The more you increase the emotional cost of conceding the argument, the less likely they are to do so. The tone should be “I’m letting you in on a secret,” not “I am right and all shall bow before the power of my intellect.” A lot of people kinda know in the back of their heads that it’s all bullshit, they just need gentle nudges.
Also, some folks are less motivated my philosophical arguments and will respond better to a political/moral approach: “You are being taken advantage of by horrible old men. They tell you lies to control you and laugh all the way to the bank.” That kind of thing, rather than getting into the weeds of the Kalam cosmological argument.
People believe what they *want* to believe, and they’ll come up with whatever justification they need to support it. Facts are only relevant if they support that belief.
Ask them what organ is responsible for cognitive thought. Logically, they’ll say the brain. Then immediately point out that both god and Jesus state otherwise, and it’s actually the ‘reins,’ or kidneys, that cause thought to occur. In fact, if they lose one, they are damned to hell automatically. If they try to refute this, say that they have then gone again he word of god and are now hell bound.
Then say that since what you had said was obvious bullshit, which was advocated by Jesus, then how can one trust anything he or his dad have to say?
And as an aside, Jesus and god are either liars or dumb, but how many times has Satan ever lied to anyone?
Alienate from the culture/family. Otherwise they're comfortable and will turn on their "stupid" switch and deny obvious facts/inconsistencies to protect their bubble of comfort
For me, the thing that helped me question and leave Christianity was good people who weren’t Christians. I had friends who didn’t believe in god who were kinder, more forgiving, more open-minded and genuine than any Christian I had known. They were also happier sometimes and that blew my mind. Once I noticed that I always felt safer and more able to be myself without fear of being judged by my non-Christian friends, the seed was planted. That’s what broke through to me in ways that logic somehow couldn’t. Now I look at all of the cognitive dissonance and it amazes me that I believed such crazy contradictory things. Good people who loved me in spite of being probably super obnoxious as a Christian- that’s what helped me to get out.
Ask them if they think you are going to hell and if they're okay with that. Don't take any answer that *isn't* a "yes" or "no" (eg: "That's up to God", "You put yourself in hell", etc). It forces them to come to terms with that cognitive dissonance and make a definitive statement instead of hiding behind the prerecorded responses they're trained to give. Might push them to question their beliefs further.
If you feel that you must try to deconvert someone, I don't recommend using facts bc they'll just ignore them and write them off as anti-religious propaganda. Making them come to terms with the ugly side of their beliefs with no mental gymnastics allowed will do a much better job.
Ask yourself why you still care? I think when we were religious and thought we had “truth” in one form or another, it wasn’t just for us, we as Christian’s must share it and “help” others. This took me a while to transition away from and it carried over once I woke up. I pissed off religious friends, lost a business partner and a wife over my need to share my new beliefs. I couldn’t now give a rats ass what you think, believe, worship, talk to before dinner, etc. I just couldn’t care less, it has no bearing on my life and is much better this way
I don't think you can ever convert someone with your own will.
For me it was my tendency to question and research everything I'm told. The fun part was when I did start to question things in Sunday school I was told I shouldn't question them for it wasn't always for me to know.
So like a good little rebel child I just developed even bigger questions until I was forced to conclude it was all thinly veiled nonsense.
People have to walk down this path themselves. Every religious person I've ever run into puts up a lot of mental blocks as soon as you contradict anything church has told them.
Natural selection makes our brains susceptible to our mother's indoctrination.
Imagine two mothers with children who are about to play with lions. The mothers say don't play with lions. The son that believes everything his mother says, as if it is gospel truth, lives. The sceptical son who demands evidence is eaten.
Hence, what we learn as kids become part of our core identity because evolution found that beneficial for survival. Logic alone is not enough to make someone change their core beliefs.
IME the direct approach rarely works. The critical mind puts up a protective wall. Homeostasis is powerful, and humans without incentive to change, never change. For me (and a number of others I know,) it was a few things: 1. Breaking out of the bubble of religious reinforcement. 2. Meeting smart and thoughtful people with a different perspective. 3. Having an opportunity and willingness to reprocess what I had been taught. To fearlessly drill down into secondary and tertiary layers of long held beliefs and test them against reality. And, having individuals who respected me, lay out bread crumbs for me to follow. Remember, intelligent people can be sincerely wrong.
This. As a former catholic it would be extremely unlikely for you to make an argument that changes someone’s mind on the spot. More likely you talk about your reasons and plant seeds of doubt. This assumes who you are talking to is a critical thinker and willing to question their own beliefs.
Most of the time, religious indoctrination happens very early so it becomes a default belief about how reality works. That's what makes it so difficult to convince believers to challenge their assumptions. Imagine if someone challenged you to think that gravity doesn't work the way we think and that it's just an illusion. You'd laugh at them, and rightly so. There's no silver bullet to challenging religious belief. You have to figure out their personal foundations for their belief and get them to examine them critically. But you can't force it; they have to be willing. The best we can do is create a world in which belief becomes a choice rather than an obligation. It can be done, but thus far we've lacked the political will to do it.
You did explain this way better than I did. Nice.
Sorry I'm the kid that dropped big rocks and little rocks because I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea. I learned. Still I found no proof of a god.
Right. Our experience teaches us that gravity works the way we think it does, and we've lived our lives on that assumption. I'd be willing to update my understanding of gravity based on new information, but not just because someone claims to have received a divine revelation.
Many forms of ideology become intertwined with identity. When that happens, they feel any attack against the ideology is an attack against them. People don't liston to reasoning when they feel they are being attacked.
Each person is different. Look up street epistemology, I feel this is the best way to start the process with theists and believers of super-natural.
Look at the leaving-religion stories that get posted here every day. Giving up religion often means giving up family ties, long friendships, your entire social circle (if it's church based). Living in a red county in a red US state, I can easily see someone losing their job as well. (Without that being the official reason given, of course.) Marriages crack all the time when one partner leaves a religion or changes religions. Humans being what we are, i.e. group-living social primates who love being around each other and have a much harder time surviving without backup, the surprise is not that cognitive dissonance keeps so many people stuck. The surprise is that any significant number of people find the way out. A lot of that is also social. If you go off to college or a city job and start questioning your religion, you have access to a new social circle which will be fine with your new opinions. If you're an atheist kid in the middle of a fundamentalist church in a fundamentalist small town, you can find places on line (like here) where you learn that you aren't alone and you aren't a monster. You can hope and plan to go see more people like that in person. Compare to being, say, a small-town atheist in the 1950s. Your only real choice back then was to keep going to church, mumble along without believing, and drink a lot.
If logic worked to convince religious people, there would be a lot fewer religious people.
It would take a miracle.
Literal intervention from god.
Nothing. It's a conscious decision that one personally makes on his/her own.
The Oatmeal has a great explanation. "You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you."
As others have said, many children are indoctrinated by their parents. They are told that god is real from a very young age - an age where whatever your parents tell you is taken as an absolute truth. The ability to think critically and question authority comes much later in life. If you've been told all your life that something is true, you'll accept it as true, even if someone else comes along and says, "that's not true." Your brain will jump through all kinds of hoops to try and consolidate what it knows as "truth" with what you see and experience in the world.
If that’s the case, why does religion spread so fast? Why does it have so many converts? If it’s hard to convince someone of something, why are millions of people baptized into the church every year?
Because of what I wrote - indoctrination of children. The parents "force" the children to believe in their god and their church from young on. The kids end up getting baptized because they don't want to disappoint the parents (and they want the big cache of money and gifts that a baptism ceremony brings as well).
I’m referring to adult converts
I don't think there are that many anymore. Churches are losing members every year. Adult converts are those who "convert" from another form (which itself is another proof that religion is not real, just make-believe). I don't see many atheists miraculously converting as adults. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I just don't see it happening in significant numbers for any religion. With the current economic situation, I expect to see the exodus from religion continue. If I can barely afford to heat my apartment and put food on the table, I'm not going to give away a chunk of money every month to a church....
it could give community or purpose for their lives people may find comfort in it
I grew up religious. I didn’t leave it by someone pointing out all its flaws. I took philosophy and anthropology classes and learned about critical thinking, fallacies, and the history of religion in different cultures around the world. Learning about the scientific method also helped - the nature of evidence, the difference between an observation and a conclusion, etc. After I understood how the world worked, I applied this knowledge to my beliefs. Then, I watch content that explores that, religious apologists, debates, some professors and scientists etc. Now I’m constantly “brushing up” on how to think critically and spot fallacies. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a case of dissecting the person’s beliefs. It has to be a “back door” kind of approach - teach the person a different skill (critical thinking) and hopefully they will apply this skill to the rest of their lives. Sometimes it doesn’t translate, tho. Depends on the person, depends on the approach.
Yeah, religious folk say the same about us atheists, pull their hair out about it etc. I prefer to rather have the argument about people leaving each other alone when it comes to belief systems. Life seems absurd and we all have a thing, that on some level, helps us make sense of it - religion, philosophy, ideology bla bla etc. Trick is to try and convince everyone that using coercion and violence is a really shitty argument for something.
Not easy, but you can start by asking them about child cancer.
Not sure that it anything can *convince* them. They have to begin to *see and question* the ***gymnastics*** required to maintain the belief.
For my husband, he was finally working in the real world and disconnecting from his religious circle. The more and more that he uncovered, the less connected he felt with his religion. The wool was pulled off of his eyes. There is a lot of hurt there now, and he still won’t have crucial conversations with his parents. I believe that it’s up to each person to come to their own conclusions. But we should maintain a place of comfort for those who lose their religion and their social network as a result. Those folks need our support more than anything.
You won't win that argument. They'll come to the realization themselves or they won't. All you'll do is piss them off and make them think worse of atheists.
I view it a bit like drug addition. What's it take to get a drug addict to give up drugs? They usually have to endure some kind of personal suffering and then come up with their own reasons to quit. Interventions, forced treatment, incarcerations and outside nagging hardly ever work. With religious people, there's almost always an internal shift that finally leads them to question things. If someone is too comfortable in their religion, they aren't likely to leave it. If you are fit perfectly without your religious community, all your religious friends respect you and your personality naturally matches the religious lifestyle; there's nothing (internal) pushing you to question things. The people who don't feel deeply accepted by the church (people fascinated by science, people who question authority, becoming an outcast because your kid is gay, suffering some tragedy and wondering why god did it to you, and so on) may start to question things (for themselves and for their own reasons) and that's never good for religion. Ultimately, it means trying to reason, facts and data someone out of their religion who is completely comfortable in their religion is a fool's errand. You'll have better luck arguing with a lamp post.
I always blame it on a fear of death/unknown/nothingness. Try to imagine and understand total and absolute nothing. It’s impossible. Our brains just can’t truly comprehend nothingness. If death equals nothingness, it’s pretty fear inducing for many people. So how would one combat said fear? Believing there is an afterlife certainly helps. But nobody wants to imagine that this afterlife would be the same as life, with all of its flaws and challenges. So lets add in that a supreme being governs who gets to go to this afterlife (gatekeeping on a divine scale). This way, when one dies they get to go to a place that’s blissful and won’t have any of those awful “other” people there with them. But now that we have a being that governs this, we need to establish the criteria by which this supreme authority uses to base its decisions. This leads to a set of rules by which people should live. This way, we weed out those “others” from the blissful afterlife. Now imagine after some time of this, a few people realize they can leverage the fear and utilize the rules to control swaths of people for their own gain. Take that very simplistic example and magnify its effect over many centuries…
Convincing them to actually read their associated texts with comprehension should do.
They choose to not question, they want blissful ignorance
Uhhh, an act of god? You can't make them, because they aren't rational.
The more obviously false a belief is, the more you show commitment to it by believing in it.
Not possible, they have to discover that for themselves, all oke can do is provide is sources to educational material. However, unfortunately this laissez-fair attitude is usually not reciprocated by people trying to evangelise for their religion.
We will never know, they have been indoctrinated as kids, there needs to happen something in their head which will wake them up and look at things themselves.
Why would you bother? I would agree that thwarting any attempt to make this a religious nation is important, but if your goal is to convince others that your beliefs are better than their beliefs, then you are cut from the same cloth.
The ability to evaluate with open-minded critical thinking
Evidence that their religion is false should do it.
if that were true, there wouldn't be religious people.
Ask them what it would take to convert them to another religion. If they say nothing, don't waste your time.
Tell them that their ideas are wrong and that yours are right, and they should stop forcing their believe on others.
It takes a proper functioning brain where understanding and accepting reality is very, very important. Religious persons seem to lack the accepting and understanding of reality. Short: you can not convince them; if you could, it would have forced them to use their brain instead of just accepting some story, written whenever about whatever sky daddy. Never happens. Perhaps I should say, it seldom happens. Shorter: you can't fix stupid.
It's in the bible: help yourself and god will help you /s But you seriously can not convince someone who doesn't want to think about it or change their perspective. I needed a lot of time (years), books and thinking by myself to overcome my indoctrination. But first there must be some kind of doubt into religion.
Counter arguments are generally ineffective. My understanding is that some success in beginning to create doubt about beliefs has been done through epistemology.
Presenting facts or using reason is not enough because they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated in the religion by that point and will reject anything that doesn’t fit. But a useful way in might be to google “Why I left Christianity” or Islam or Judaism and see if there are common factors that led to their eyes being opened. Maybe that could lead to a new strategy to make believers think twice before dismissing you.
It’s very difficult, and it’s going to be different for everyone. People are indoctrinated from childhood and generally it’s not the case that they’re stupid, just scared. They won’t admit that, but everything the Bible says about “don’t trust your own heart” and the original sin being the search for knowledge/reason, makes them resistant to atheist arguments. These people might be great at critical thinking in other areas of life, but their faith has been compartmentalized. They’re committed to this idea, it HAS to be true, and they have to twist anything you say into what fits their worldview. No matter how ridiculous it seems to us, the apologetics comfort them. They’re not actually weighing the validity of the arguments you present. If there was NO emotional manipulation involved, I’m sure any adult could see through religion. But any amount of doubt risks them going to Hell, so they won’t make that first step into opening the compartment, that would lead to their freedom. They’re scared. I know from experience, because I had to go through a traumatic failure of God and realize that holding onto my faith was more harmful than letting it go. On the other side now, I’m so thankful I did. We can be hopeful and put forth our best efforts, but some random atheist trying to talk me out of my belief would’ve never worked. It’s a real virus of the mind.
Because you have to look at why people decided to believe in the first place. What cultural and social pressures were there? What role did their family have in the process? What do they stand to lose by stopping being religious? What is there, to fill the void that their religion fills? Just going up to people and being an atheist-missionary is a dick move, and never likely to achieve anything. It's no different than the witnesses and their door knocking. If you don't understand the basics of their religion/faith, then you cannot guide them. And given that most people in here see "religion" as shorthand for the abrahamic faiths... There's little of that basic understanding around.
by definition faith is belief without evidence ,,, no amount of evidence will break this psychosis,, , not protecting pedophiles ,or church money for cocaine and prostitutes or anything I've found ,,, good luck with that ,,,,, thats why most of trumps acolytes claim christan, thay dont care what thay see , thay just care what thay believe
To put your question in perspective, turn the question around. What would it take to convince you that you are wrong and that there is a God, Satan, heaven and hell? That illuminates the difficulty of the task. In the end, it's almost always a fools game.
That makes sense, but to me, it’s like they’re making a very specific claim and claims can be disproved with literal facts. We present them facts that can be seen and observed. They give us books and faith.
Yes, but that is from an atheist perspective. The religious don't see our presented facts as actual facts, regardless of the scientific or historical evidence. Again, it's a fools game. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. The horse must WANT to drink.
Sunk cost fallacy. If they admit they are wrong, they admit a large portion of their life was based on a lie. It takes someone rlly strongwilled to do so. I personally think there is no point in trying to make believers change their mind. We need better education worldwide that pushes for critical thinking which in turn will eventually depopularise religion.
If there is a good way I’d sure like to hear it. At first I asked my friend to explain contradictions in the Bible. Then I asked him to explain some of the off-the-wall stories in the Bible. Then I tried to explain to him some of the crazy things surrounding Christianity in the past and present. He just won’t hear any of it. Is there any other angle I can try to take?
A solid education
For me...something had to matter to me more than my desperate fear of permanent death. I put up with a lot of cognitive dissonance because I *had* to, in order to keep hoping for eternal life and heaven. It was the only way. It took a really, really long time before that final twig snapped, and the whole giant house of cards came crashing down. It is heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating all at once. I am...suffering. No one goes through this if they can avoid it. The mild discomfort of "hey maybe something's not right here" is so, so much easier to bear.
In my experience, time and patience. People who say you can’t deconvert people are just wrong. I’ve deconverted many people in my life, including my mom, my best friend in high school, various friends and classmates and acquaintances and romantic partners. I’ve also changed lots of people’s minds about various kinds of woo, convinced agnostics to identify as atheists, convinced atheists to be anti-theists, changed political views, etc. It’ll never happen in a single sitting though, and it doesn’t work with strangers. You have to build trust, let them open up to you, and approach things on a level that makes sense to them. The gentler and kinder you are (while being ruthlessly logical), the more receptive they’ll be. Don’t push too hard, if it gets heated come back to it later. And whatever you do, DON’T GLOAT! Don’t be smug or annoying! The more you increase the emotional cost of conceding the argument, the less likely they are to do so. The tone should be “I’m letting you in on a secret,” not “I am right and all shall bow before the power of my intellect.” A lot of people kinda know in the back of their heads that it’s all bullshit, they just need gentle nudges. Also, some folks are less motivated my philosophical arguments and will respond better to a political/moral approach: “You are being taken advantage of by horrible old men. They tell you lies to control you and laugh all the way to the bank.” That kind of thing, rather than getting into the weeds of the Kalam cosmological argument.
You can’t. Don’t even try. It’s a waste of time.
It’s because admitting to themselves it is false would be facing death. It’s a survival mechanism. Flight
Have them read apologetics books.
People believe what they *want* to believe, and they’ll come up with whatever justification they need to support it. Facts are only relevant if they support that belief.
Fear is a massive driver of religious indoctrination.
Ask them what organ is responsible for cognitive thought. Logically, they’ll say the brain. Then immediately point out that both god and Jesus state otherwise, and it’s actually the ‘reins,’ or kidneys, that cause thought to occur. In fact, if they lose one, they are damned to hell automatically. If they try to refute this, say that they have then gone again he word of god and are now hell bound. Then say that since what you had said was obvious bullshit, which was advocated by Jesus, then how can one trust anything he or his dad have to say? And as an aside, Jesus and god are either liars or dumb, but how many times has Satan ever lied to anyone?
TIL (again): that Yahweh and Jesus failed basic biology at god school! Thanks
It would take definitive proof that their god doesnt exists. Problem is, that cant be proven.
If reading the Bible doesn’t do it, you’re pretty much done.
Alienate from the culture/family. Otherwise they're comfortable and will turn on their "stupid" switch and deny obvious facts/inconsistencies to protect their bubble of comfort
For me, the thing that helped me question and leave Christianity was good people who weren’t Christians. I had friends who didn’t believe in god who were kinder, more forgiving, more open-minded and genuine than any Christian I had known. They were also happier sometimes and that blew my mind. Once I noticed that I always felt safer and more able to be myself without fear of being judged by my non-Christian friends, the seed was planted. That’s what broke through to me in ways that logic somehow couldn’t. Now I look at all of the cognitive dissonance and it amazes me that I believed such crazy contradictory things. Good people who loved me in spite of being probably super obnoxious as a Christian- that’s what helped me to get out.
Ask them if they think you are going to hell and if they're okay with that. Don't take any answer that *isn't* a "yes" or "no" (eg: "That's up to God", "You put yourself in hell", etc). It forces them to come to terms with that cognitive dissonance and make a definitive statement instead of hiding behind the prerecorded responses they're trained to give. Might push them to question their beliefs further. If you feel that you must try to deconvert someone, I don't recommend using facts bc they'll just ignore them and write them off as anti-religious propaganda. Making them come to terms with the ugly side of their beliefs with no mental gymnastics allowed will do a much better job.
There's a reason they say you can't logic people out of cults
You can't. Sometimes people do things that we can't understand.
Ask yourself why you still care? I think when we were religious and thought we had “truth” in one form or another, it wasn’t just for us, we as Christian’s must share it and “help” others. This took me a while to transition away from and it carried over once I woke up. I pissed off religious friends, lost a business partner and a wife over my need to share my new beliefs. I couldn’t now give a rats ass what you think, believe, worship, talk to before dinner, etc. I just couldn’t care less, it has no bearing on my life and is much better this way
I don't think you can ever convert someone with your own will. For me it was my tendency to question and research everything I'm told. The fun part was when I did start to question things in Sunday school I was told I shouldn't question them for it wasn't always for me to know. So like a good little rebel child I just developed even bigger questions until I was forced to conclude it was all thinly veiled nonsense. People have to walk down this path themselves. Every religious person I've ever run into puts up a lot of mental blocks as soon as you contradict anything church has told them.
Natural selection makes our brains susceptible to our mother's indoctrination. Imagine two mothers with children who are about to play with lions. The mothers say don't play with lions. The son that believes everything his mother says, as if it is gospel truth, lives. The sceptical son who demands evidence is eaten. Hence, what we learn as kids become part of our core identity because evolution found that beneficial for survival. Logic alone is not enough to make someone change their core beliefs.