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[QUOTE=begbert2]
Or is it that, with religion, truth is not a defense? It doesn’t matter if they’re flat wrong and their religion is full of more holes than a swiss cheese that’s made entirely of air - you can’t point this fact out even if it’s true, or you’re disrespecting their beliefs again.
Needless to say, careful avoidance of disrespecting their beliefs is no better a way to convince them of their errors than cursing and throwing feces at them is - you can’t change enyone’s mind if you don’t take them out of their comfort zone.
You can stay friends with religious people just fine by never challenging their beliefs. And in a lot of real-life circumstances, this is often the better choice than the generally doomed attempt to pop their bubble of beliefs. However, we’re on a message board, in a forum called Great Debates, in a thread discussing what evidence may be reasonably gathered to objectively support the axiomatically accepted religious belief that God is loving. I don’t feel the need to avoid engaging in religious debate here; do you?
[/QUOTE]
**
Amen. LOL
It’s true, the issue of being ‘respectful’ will always come up; people generally, in my experience, can’t or won’t distinguish between a vicious attack on their argument and a vicious attack on their person and then conflate the two by starting to call you names instead of calling your argument names.
I do wonder about the conversion part though. I’ve actually done it.
That is, I’ve converted people out of their religious belief systems. Or, contributed to that happening. But this is how it worked.
I was relentless in attacking their logic (within their own belief systems, and within their own premises). This made them testy. And angry. And snippy.
And it made them say absurd things.
Which is what happens when you’re ideologically forced to never concede defeat.
(He’d say, “at our “temples” we’re allowed to question everything!”. Really? Does that include questioning whether or not your belief system is complete and total bullshit and a scam to make money for the organization? Of course not. The ‘open conversations’ are really all just premised on a basic agreement that the fundamentals are true. So it’s not really open.)
Anyway, human nature being what it is when he did finally give it up you know what the reason was? Something that really didn’t warrant giving up the belief. Specifically, the fact that some religious act didn’t result in the predicted outcome.
Which, ironically, wasn’t even a fair reason to dismiss the perspective. I pointed that out. Others have left when they felt the fellow believers weren’t being nice or supportive to them as people and I was. But that’s not really a reason to think their ideology is wrong though.
What seems to happen is that when a person leaves these beliefs, they do so based on something seemingly shallow or incidental.
I didn’t find that my arguments were ever going to make them leave in a million years in and of themselves. In fact, I suggested afterwards that my arguments probably unnaturally delayed his departure from those beliefs by reflexively causing him to hold his ground that he otherwise would’ve started to depart from.
The advantage that my arguments did have, however, and the contribution they made to the overall ‘conversion’ is that after they’d decided to leave based on what I’d say are dubious logical premises, all of our conversations came flooding back and they quickly had “ooooh, yea now I see…” moments that wouldn’t have been possible if all those objections hadn’t been stuck in their head earlier.
Suddenly, they felt that the whole thing was transparently ridiculous.
And once on the outside of those types of belief systems, you generally don’t go back to that particular thing in that version. I think it’s like deprogramming from a cult. They realize they’d hijacked their mind to justify the beliefs they felt they should hold.
And that’s not the same as the use of our minds to further beliefs that are critically assessed and re-assessed. There’s a difference. In the latter, the entire foundational premise is up for debate but not in the former.
Now, he’s fending off believers that are grasping at straws to get him back.
There’s a zero percent chance of that now though; he’s seen it for what it is.
Sort of the way education works over ignorance. To call the greater knowledge just another form or ignorance or point of view is where folks part ways.
