knucklehead

You can deal with every complaint they have and get them to concede every point and in the end they will continue with their “faith”.

I’ve been thinking hard about this issue for the last couple of days since somebody asked for advice on this many threads ago. First, you have to get clear on the concept that it is religious faith. You aren’t going to undo it in one conversation. You aren’t going to be able to reason with it. You’re looking for religious conversion. How does religious conversion occur? You have to plant the seeds of doubt and let it germinate over the course of time. Think of Voltaire. It will probably take years but it’s worth the effort.

I see this sort of religious belief as a sort of higher-level aggregation of reality. On the first level, there are various facts: people blown up in Iraq, WTC attack, etc. Then on the next level we abstract from that reality: the world is a mess, Bush is bad. Then our minds lock onto the abstraction. Bush is bad! Bush is evil! Bush is EVIL! All abstractions are necessarily partial falsifications of reality; all abstractions necessarily ignore some facts which are inconvenient. When things get to the lock-on phase though the emotions have completely occluded the rational mind.

I think the first stage is to get some emotional relaxation: “Ok, Bush is bad, but let’s think about that.”. Move back to the rational side. Make it non-threatening. The worst thing you can do is attack head-on. Instead, relax the emotions a bit. The next stage is to unwind the generalization a bit, go back to the particulars: “Ok, Bush is bad, but he’s not bad in each and every particular; let’s discuss some of the facts in detail here.”.

Religious conversion can never occur at the higher level.

Another thought is that when things get really religious, there’s no way to attack the religious conviction head-on. Rather, it’s necessary to show how this particular belief is at odds with other beliefs. Witness Samuel’s moving story of his own conversion. “Bush is Hitler” had to go head-to-head against his conviction that Hitler had literally killed his family. The latter was a stronger belief and “Bush is Hitler” had to be rethought, which caused the whole belief system to be reevaluated and much of it fell apart under analysis.

I am convinced that the change in the narrative occurs gradually and subconsciously and that it is necessary to make the rational case even though it doesn’t seem to have any effect at first. Eventually it does.