"A Manual for Creating Atheists" by Peter Boghossain

• Effective interventions depend upon understanding core beliefs and definitions.
• When pressed, the faithful will offer vague definitions that are merely transparent attempts to evade criticism, or simplistic definitions that intentionally muddy the meaning of “faith.”
• A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless.
• Virtually all statements by Deepak Chopra are deepities.
• Christians in particular have created a tradition to employ deepities, used slippery definitions of faith, and hidden behind unclear language since at least the time of Augustine (354 - 430).
• The words we use are important. They can help us see clearly, or they can confuse, cloud, or obscure issues.
• Faith has two definitions:
• Belief without evidence.
• Pretending to know things you don’t.
• If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith.
• “Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one goes ahead and believes anyway.
• If one claims knowledge either in the absence of evidence, or when a claim is contradicted by evidence, then this is when the word “faith” is used.
• As a Street Epistemologist, whenever you hear the word “faith,” just translate this in your head as, “pretending to know things you don’t know.” While swapping these words may make the sentence clunky, “pretending to know things you don’t know”will make the meaning of the sentence clear.
• Faith and hope are not synonyms.
• “Promise,” “confidence,” “trust,” and “hope” are not knowledge claims. One can hope for anything or place one’s trust in anyone or anything. This is not the same as claiming to know something. To hope for something admits there’s the possibility that what you want may not be realized.
• Desire is not certainty but the wish for an outcome.
• Hoping is not the same as knowing.
• Many of the faithful imagine that just as a theist firmly believes in a God, an a-theist firmly disbelieves in God.
• “Atheist,” as I use the term, means, “There’s insufficient evidence to warrant belief in a divine, supernatural creator of the universe. However, if I were shown sufficient evidence to warrant belief in such an entity, then I would believe.”
• The atheist does not claim, “No matter how solid the evidence for a supernatural creator, I refuse to believe.”
• A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision.
• Agnostics profess not to know whether or not there’s an undetectable, metaphysical entity that created the universe. Agnostics think there’s not enough evidence to warrant belief in God, but because it’s logically possible they remain unsure of God’s existence. Again, an agnostic is willing to revise her belief if provided sufficient evidence.
• The problem with agnosticism is that in the last 2,400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny.
• “Agnostic” and “agnosticism” are unnecessary terms. Street Epistemologists should avoid them.
• Faith claims are knowledge claims.
• The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek “episteme,” which means “knowledge,” and “logos,” which means “reason and logic” and “argument and inquiry” and therefore, by extension, “the study of.”
• Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that focuses on how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is, and what processes of knowing the world are reliable.
• Conclusions one comes to as the result of an epistemological process are knowledge claims.
• A knowledge claim is an assertion of truth.
• Faith is an epistemology. It’s a method and a process people use to understand reality. Faith-based conclusions are knowledge claims.
• Those who make faith claims are professing to know something about the external world.
• Much of the confusion about faith-based claims comes from mistaking objective claims with subjective claims.
• Knowledge claims purport to be objective because they assert a truth about the world. Subjective claims are not knowledge claims and do not assert a truth about the world; rather, they are statements about one’s own unique, situated, subjective, personal experiences or preferences.
• Think of subjective claims as matters of taste or opinion.
• Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world.
• Faith is an unreliable epistemology.
• If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value. Believing on the basis of insufficient evidence cannot point one toward truth.
• As a tool, as an epistemology, as a method of reasoning, as a process for knowing the world, faith cannot adjudicate between competing claims.
• Faith cannot steer one away from falsehood and toward truth. This is because faith does not have a built-in corrective mechanism. That is, faith claims have no way to be corrected, altered, revised, or modified.
• The only way to figure out which claims about the world are likely to be true, and which are false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way.
• Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities.
• The less one relies on reason and evidence to form conclusions, the more arbitrary the conclusion.
• Afghanistan under the Taliban was an unmitigated catastrophe.
• The vast majority of people use faith to understand the world, to guide their actions, and to ground their institutions.
• Religious belief is very often defended through the use of clever semantics.
• The emotional satisfaction of religious belief vitally depends upon the beliefs being taken literally; the epistemic defense of such beliefs crucially depends on taking them non literally. This type of cognitive disruption does not bode well in the search for truth.
• What nearly all sophisticated believers do is simultaneously deceive themselves while alternating between two stances: they absolutely don’t believe that--of course he didn’t walk on water--while voicing unflappable conviction about this--the world was created by a higher power. When defending epistemically, they characterize the belief as not literally requiring the existence of a Special Person, but then as soon as they have satisfied the epistemic challenge, they reframe the belief more literally.
• Whether a person is an atheist or a believer is immaterial with respect to morality, and yet, moral ascriptions are frequently made to atheists and to the faithful.
• Atheism is about epistemology, evidence, honesty, sincerity, reason, and inquiry.
• Once one buys into a system of belief without evidence, it’s unclear on what basis one could make the claim that there’s a correct or incorrect interpretation [of the belief].
• Absent any desire to know one is either certain or indifferent.
• If you believe you have the truth then why would you seek another truth?
• Certainty is the enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth.
• Faith taints or at worst removes our curiosity about the world, what we should value, and what type of life we should lead. Faith replaces wonder with epistemological arrogance disguised as false humility.
• Among the goals of the Street Epistemologist are to instill a self consciousness of ignorance, a determination to challenge foundational beliefs, a relentless hunger for truth, and a desire to know.
• The sense of moving your intellectual life forward and feeding the hunger to know are a vital part of the human experience.
• Whenever we have a chance to peek at our prejudices and see our own biases and underexamined assumptions, we have an opportunity to attack those assumptions and to rid ourselves from the presumption of knowledge.
• Non-religious people who convert often do so as a result of a sudden, highly emotional event, either a personal one or a societal one. However, the most likely path to un-faith is slower, taking years to unfold, and going through a lot of readings, conversations, and reflection.
• Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network.
• There are five reasons why otherwise reasonable people embrace absurd propositions:
• They have a history of not formulating their beliefs on the basis of evidence.
• They formulate their beliefs on what they thought was reliable evidence but wasn’t.
• They have never been exposed to competing epistemologies and beliefs.
• They yield to social pressures.
• They devalue truth or are relativists.
• I use the term [doxastic closure] to mean that either a specific belief one holds, or the one’s entire belief system, is resistant to revision.
• Belief revision means changing one’s mind about whether a belief is true or false.
• We seek out people and groups with ideologies similar to our own--we like to be around people who value what we value. One consequence of clustering is to further cement the process of doxastic closure; when surrounded by “ideological likes,” even far-fetched beliefs become normalized.
• A “filter bubble” describes the phenomena of online portals predicting and delivering customized information users want based upon algorithms that take pre existing data into account. Consequently, and unbeknownst to the user, the information users see is in ideological conformity with their beliefs.
• Combine clustering in like-minded communities with filter bubbles, then put that on top of a cognitive architecture that predisposes one to belief and favors confirmation bias, then throw in the fact that critical thinking and reasoning require far more intellectual labor then acceptance of simple solutions and platitudes, then liberally sprinkle the virulence of certain belief systems, then infuse with the data that holding certain beliefs and using certain processes of reasoning are moral acts, and then lay this entire mixture upon the difficulty of just trying to make a living and get through the day with any time for reflection, and viola: doxastic closure!
• Doxastic openness is a willingness and ability to revise beliefs. Doxastic openness occurs the moment one becomes aware of one’s ignorance; it is the instant one realizes one’s beliefs may not be true.
• Awareness of ignorance is by definition doxastic openness.
• Street Epistemologists should set the realistic goal of helping the faithful become more doxastically open. Sow the seeds of doubt.
• If someone is suffering from a brain-based faith delusion your work will be futile.
• When people are presented with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, or are shown that they don’t have sufficient evidence to warrant beliefs, or learn that there’s a contradiction in their beliefs, or come to understand that their reasoning is in error, they seem to cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.
• A pathogenic belief is a belief that directly or indirectly leads to emotional, psychological, or physical pathology; in other words, holding a pathogenic belief is self-sabotaging and leads one away from human well-being.
• Based upon data with human subjects, psychiatrists have posited that therapeutic interventions work by creating an environment where the therapist continually frustrates a pathogenic belief; this causes the patient to redouble their efforts to prove the pathogenic hypothesis.
• Once you expose a belief or an epistemology as fraudulent, you’re likely to hear statements of greater confidence.
• People adhere to certain behaviors so that they can receive benefits like respect, recognition, friendship, and solidarity from their community.
• Failure to acquiesce may mean being stigmatized or worse.
• Most people are afraid of feeling anxiety and they’ll do anything they can to distract themselves from it.
• When people aren’t reasoned into their faith, it is difficult to reason them out of their faith.
• Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition.
• It’s important not to just be aware, but also to be sincere when asking ourselves why we hold the beliefs we do.
• Sincerity is indispensable not just in leading an examined life, but also in having meaningful relationships.
• An intervention is an attempt to help people, or “subjects” as they’re referred to in a clinical context, change their beliefs and/or behavior.
• It’s more likely you’ll earn success if you view what you’re doing as an intervention and consider a person of faith as someone who needs your help--as opposed to passing judgement.
• Interventions are not about winning or losing, they’re about helping people see through a delusion and reclaim a sense of wonder.
• On a personal level, you’ll likely find deeper satisfaction in helping people than in winning a debate.
• Keep in mind the possibility the faithful know something you don’t, that they may have a reliable method of reasoning that you’ve overlooked, that there’s a miscommunication, or that they can somehow help you to think more clearly.
• When someone suffers from a doxastic pathology, they tend to not really listen to an argument, to not carefully think through alternatives, and to lead with their conclusion and work backward (this is called “confirmation bias”).
• Few things are more dangerous than people who think they’re in possession of absolute truth. Honest inquirers with sincere questions and an open mind rarely contribute to the misery of the world. Passionate, doxastically closed believers contribute to human suffering and inhibit human well-being.
• If someone knows something that you don’t know, acknowledge that you don’t know.
• You need to become comfortable with not knowing and not pretending to know, even though others may ridicule you or attempt to make you feel inadequate for not pretending to know something they themselves are only pretending to know.
• People dig themselves into cognitive sinkholes by habituating themselves to not formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence. Hence the beliefs most people hold are not tethered to reality.
• If people believed on the basis of evidence then they wouldn’t find themselves in their current cognitive quagmire.
• Do not bring particular pieces of evidence (facts, data points) into the discussion when attempting to disabuse people of specific faith propositions.
• Remember: the core of the intervention is not changing beliefs, but changing the way people form beliefs.
• Bringing facts into the discussion is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem: the problem is with epistemologies people use, not with conclusions people hold.
• The futility of trying to persuade the faithful by way of evidence is particularly conspicuous in fundamentalists and in people who experience severe doxastic pathologies.
• The introduction of facts may also prove unproductive because this usually leads to a discussion about what constitutes reliable evidence.
• Nearly all of the faithful suffer from an acute form of confirmation bias: they start with a core belief first and work their way backward to specific beliefs.
• Every religious apologist is epistemically debilitated by an extreme form of confirmation bias.
• By starting with a belief first and working backward, his beliefs make perfect sense to him as well as those who begin with the same belief.
• Another example of confirmation bias occurs when someone tells their pastor, for example, that they’re having doubts about their faith. Their pastor in turn tells them to read the Bible and pray about it. This is asking someone to start with their belief first and see what happens--what will happen is that their belief will strengthen.
• Doxastic closure almost always results from pressures independent of evidence. Therefore you should avoid facts, evidence, metaphysics, and data points in discussions with those suffering from faith-based forms of doxastic closure.
• Before one can help others to overcome false beliefs, it’s important to understand the structure of belief within the context of an epistemological intervention.
• In philosophy, the two primary schools regarding belief (epistemic) justification are coherentism and foundationalism. Coherentists think belief statements are justified if they cohere or comport with other statements within the belief system. Foundationalists argue the specific beliefs are justified if they’re inferred from other beliefs.
• Using a coherentist model, it’s impossible to break through and meaningfully engage, because of the circular nature of justification. That is, each artifact is justified by other artifacts, yet does not receive justification from any outside source. Thus, from inside a coherentist system everything makes sense.
• Street Epistemologists should use a foundationalist paradigm when deconstructing a subject’s faith.
• It’s helpful to conceptualize the structure of belief architecturally--a belief system is like a large house. There are foundational beliefs at the base of the house that hold up the entire edifice. There are also secondary and tertiary beliefs that act as scaffolding for the structure--these beliefs are important to give coherence and solidity to the structure but they are dispensable to the structure’s support. To demolish a building, start with the base. Take out the support beam and the entire structure will fail. Faith is the base. Faith holds up the entire structure of belief. Collapse faith and the entire edifice falls.
• By undermining faith one is able to undermine almost all religions simultaneously, and it may be easier to help someone to abandon their faith than it is to separate them from their religion.
• Your interventions should target faith, not religion.
• The greatest obstacle to engendering reason and rationality is faith.
• This is how the vast majority of believers experience their religious life--as a communal and social event that adds meaning, purpose, and joy to their lives.
• Attacks on religion are often perceived as attacks on friends, families, communities, and relationships. As such, attacking religion may alienate people, making it even more difficult to separate them from their faith.
• Religion is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier to reason and rationality.
• Attempting to disabuse people of a belief in God is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem. God is the conclusion that one arrives at as a result of a faulty reasoning process (and also social and cultural pressures). The faulty reasoning process--the problem--is faith.
• Belief without evidence is the problem.
• By targeting belief in God, you also run the risk of modeling the wrong behavior--the behavior of being doxastically closed--of having a closed belief system and an inability to revise your beliefs.
• You should be modeling doxastic openness--a willingness to revise your beliefs.
• Targeting belief in God may be perceived as a type of militancy, particularly about things that cannot be known, and may push people even further into their faith-based delusions as a consequence of your perceived metaphysical extremism.
• One consequence of thinking more clearly and learning how to reason is that one will place less confidence in one’s conclusions.
• Focus on epistemology and rarely, if ever, allow metaphysics into the discussion. In other words, focus on undermining one’s confidence in how one claims to know what one knows (epistemology) as opposed to what one believes exists (metaphysics/God).
• Target each epistemological claim separately. Do not move on to another claim until the subject concedes that the particular claim in question is not sufficient to warrant belief in God.
• It’s crucial to undermine the value that one should lend one’s belief to a proposition because of something allegedly noble in the act of believing, or in the act of professing to believe. There’s nothing virtuous about pretending to know things you don’t know or in lending one’s belief to a particular proposition.
• Formulating beliefs on the basis of evidence and acting accordingly does not make one a better person. It just makes it more likely that one’s beliefs will be true and far less likely that one’s beliefs will be false.
• The belief that faith is a virtue and that one should have faith are primary impediments to disabusing people of their faith.
• Faith is bundled with a moral foundation. Many people, even those who do not have faith, buy into the mistaken notion that faith is a virtue.
• Faith-based interventions need to target and decouple the linkage between faith and morality.
• Many people haven’t considered the fact that having faith is unconnected to morality, and so stating it bluntly may achieve a certain “shock and awe” among a particular segment of the faithful.
• “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?”
• “How would you differentiate your belief from a delusion? How do you know that you’re not delusional?”
• Understand from the outset that it’s unrealistic to expect a subject will stop pretending to know things she doesn’t know on, during, or immediately after her first treatment.
• When people begin to genuinely question their faith, or when their pathogenic hypothesis is frustrated, they may be unhappy with their interlocutor.
• Model the behavior you want to emulate.
• The Transtheoretical Model of change states that behavior change occurs in a series of stages.
• precontemplation (not ready to change)
• contemplation (getting ready to change)
• preparation (ready to change)
• action (changing)
• maintenance (sustaining change)
• termination (change complete)
• Precontemplation is somewhat similar to a state of doxastic closure--the faithful don’t even imagine that they need to change because they don’t understand that they have a problem.
• Precontemplation means that one is at the stage before contemplation even begins and thus does not mean denial.
• Contemplative means that people see a need to change their behavior but don’t think it can be done, or they’re wondering if they should change but they’re not really sure.
• Avoid politics whenever possible.
• Undermine faith and all faith-based conclusions are simultaneously undermined.
• Often, conclusions one comes to on these issues [abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, stem cell research, pornography, contraception, etc.] are consequences of a failed epistemology: faith.
• When appropriate, relate to your subject by bringing in shared personal experiences.
• Don’t get sidetracked by politics or metaphysics; keep the treatment focused on epistemology.
• Truthfulness of reason and willingness to reconsider are two crucial post treatment attitudes the faithful need in order to make a full recovery.
• Shermer has noted that the smarter someone is the better they are at rationalizing.
• System 1 thinking (intuition) is instantaneous, automatic, subconscious, and often has some degree of emotional valence; System 1 thinking is the result of habits and resistance to change. System 2 thinking (reasoning) is much slower, more subject to change, more conscious, and requires more effort.
• Many beliefs are formed on the basis of System 1 fast-thinking phenomenon. Doxastic closure can come about when people lack the system capacity to reinsert evidence into their System 1 thinking--that is, their System 1 thinking is invulnerable to System 2 thinking. They haven’t developed the ability to allow System 2 thinking to penetrate System 1 beliefs.
• Winning is not what the creationists realistically aspire to. For them, it is sufficient that the debate happens at all. They need to publicity. To the gullible public which is their natural constituency, it is enough that their man is seen sharing a platform with a real scientist.
• Arguing about what constitutes evidence and what are the criteria for evidence usually results in shifting the discussion into ever-receding tangets. Such shifts are common rhetorical tactics of apologists.
• The more intelligent and articulate the apologist, the more conspicuous and epistemologically enfeebling the confirmation bias.
• It’s very difficult to start from a position of belief neutrality because everyone suffers from some form of confirmation bias.
• The process of genuinely opening oneself up to competing ideas is vital for one’s intellectual life, because it prevents doxastic closure.
• Bringing metaphysics into a discussion is usually fruitless and may even be counterproductive, in some cases pushing people further into their faith and metaphysical delusions.
• Conversations about what there is, as opposed to how one knows what there is, cannot gain cognitive traction because the entities in question have no attributes that leave a footprint in the natural realm. Given this starting condition, there’s nowhere for the conversation to move.
• One reason many people assign belief in God a high number on the Dawkins’ scale is because they started with metaphysics and worked their way back to epistemology. That is, people started with the belief God exists and then asked themselves how they know this. This is confirmation bias.
• Knowledge is not a fuzzy thing that we can decide to have or not. You lend your belief to a proposition because you’re forced to believe it by, among other things, the thoughtfulness that you have given to the problem.
• Choosing to believe a particular proposition is referred to in the philosophical literature as “doxastic volunteerism.”
• Culture-bound syndromes are recognizable diseases only within a specific culture or society.
• Pascal’s Wager states that one should bet as if God exists, and consequently believe and live as if God exists, because if one does so then one has everything to gain and nothing to lose.
• Meet people where they are.
• If one thinks that he has the truth, one stops looking.
• The Socratic method may sound complicated, but essentially it’s asking questions and getting answers.
• Effectively used, the Socratic method can create moments of doxastic openness--moments when individuals become aware that their reasoning is in error.
• The Socratic method has five stages:
• wonder
• hypothesis
• elenchus
• accepting or revising the hypothesis
• acting accordingly
• The Socratic method begins in wonder. Wondering takes propositional format--words are used to capture one’s thoughts--and are thus expressed as questions.
• Hypotheses are speculative responses to questions posed in stage 1 (wonder). They’re tentative answers to the object of wonder.
• The elenchus, or question and answer, is the heart of the Socratic method. In the elenchus, which is essentially a logical refutation, Socrates uses counterexamples to challenge the hypothesis. The purpose of the counterexample is to call the hypothesis into question and ultimately show that it’s false.
• In the elenchus, the Socratic facilitator generates one or more ways that the hypothesis could be false. That is, what conditions could be in place that would make the hypothesis untrue?
• A hypothesis is never proven to be true. After a hypothesis survives repeated iterations in the elenchus, this only means that to date it has withstood a processes of falsification. A single counterexample can kill a hypothesis, yet even millions of confirming instances don’t change the status of the hypothesis.
• The elenchus is a simple yet effective way to undermine a hypothesis by eliciting contradictions and inconsistencies in one’s reasoning, and thus engendering aporia.
• In stage 4, the hypothesis is either accepted as provisionally true, or it’s rejected. If it’s accepted as true then this ends the elenchus and immediately beings stage 5. If it’s rejected then another hypothesis is given and the elenchus begins again.
• As a consequence of the Socratic method, one would ideally act upon the results of one’s inquiry.
• Sometimes, even after years of treatment, the faith virus is not separated from its host.
• Remember that the goal of each intervention is to move the subject one step along the transtheoretical model.
• We learn from our failures, not from our successes.
• It’s a good idea to ask someone to repeat or restate their claim.
• If you construct your statement with the passive voice, the subject may be more likely to be open to alternative causes.
• I’ve found that questions, as opposed to statements, tend to be less threatening as people feel they have the freedom to answer as they like.
• In discussions of faith in particular, it’s crucial the Socratic clinician differentiate between people and propositions.
• Faith is a deeply personal experience for people, and the more faith as an epistemology can be separated from faith as an identity, the easier the transition from stage 3 (elenchus) to stage 5 (action).
• Getting too personal about something so intimate can be very threatening.
• “I don’t know” is a deceptively powerful statement. It also leads the subject to think, correctly, that you don’t have all of the answers and that not having all the answers is okay.
• A pregnant pause is a very useful, nonthreatening technique, typically used in sales, to get the result you want. Often the uncomfortable silence will be filled by an answer; regardless, it allows the discourse to move forward, but if the dialectical space isn’t filled you can continue at your leisure.
• A little humor, if it’s sincere and well met, goes a long way to cementing the therapeutic alliance.
• Humor is an incredibly effective and underused dialectical technique, probably underused because there are so many ways it can backfire. But when successful almost nothing is more effective in advancing rapport.
• The phrase “open yourself up” and the word “gift” are frequently used to indoctrinate people into faith systems. Those terms may also be effective in nudging people toward embracing reason.
• When administering Socratic treatments, make sure to offer as few hypothesis as possible. If you get stuck, and are unsure how to proceed, reset the conversation back to wonder.
• It’s easier to elicit contradictions from responses that indicate certainty as opposed to ambiguity. Showing someone doesn’t have the necessary justification to warrant belief in a claim in which they’re certain is fairly easy. All one has to do is find some condition that could possibly hold that undermines the truth potential for the belief in question.
• Socratic interventions are easy to administer, no-cost treatments that can engender doxastic openness and separate faith from its host. The main way this happens is by helping expose contradictions and inconsistencies in subjects’ reasoning process.
• Be aware of the stages of the method. Don’t transition from one stage to another stage until you’ve exhausted everything you need to do in that particular stage.
• The Drake Equation estimates the number of intelligent, technologically capable civilizations in the universe.
• The current body of literature is highly suggestive, though not conclusive, that the Socratic method, can be used as a self-imposed corrective mechanism that helps people fix flaws in their reasoning.
• Atheism is a conclusion one comes to after a sincere, honest evaluation of the evidence. Here’s the evidence for the existence of God: Nothing. There is no evidence for God’s existence.
• Initially the abandonment of faith can be both liberating and traumatic, especially when one “comes out” to unsupportive friends and family.
• Always be prepared to furnish resources at the end of your intervention, and also have that information on hand just in case you run into a subject at a later time.
• Forming new relationships is important because these interactions mitigate the risk of recidivating and falling back into faith communities.
• Disrupting one’s interpersonal milieu by providing supportive relationships and communities has the potential to cement new values and new, more reliable epistemologies--this is especially crucial in early stages (precontemplation, contemplation, preparation) when one begins to question one’s faith.
• Wonder, open-mindedness, the disposition of being comfortable with not knowing, uncertainty, a skeptical and scientific-minded attitude, and the genuine desire to know what’s true--these are the attributes of a liberated mind.
• One of the most disappointing realizations for an unseasoned Street Epistemologist is understanding the degree to which wonder and inquiry are prisoner to social values.
• Interrupting the relationship between wonder and those institutions and forces that put down free inquiry will require the creation of a potent social and intellectual movement--a New Enlightenment--that will enable individuals to adopt the disposition toward reason en masse.
• Once one has been indoctrinated and infected by faith, there may be nothing we can offer those in need that would grant them the same psychological and emotional comfort offered by their misplaced trust in the world.
• The human species is made stronger by the fact that in the end we’re all going to die.
• Faith’s greatest appeal may be solace--comfort and peace of mind in impossibly difficult times.
• The thrust of our message must be that there are things we don’t know and it’s okay to not know--even in death. Not claiming to know something you don’t know isn’t a character flaw, it is a virtue.
• There are only three defenses in response to critiques of religion:
• religion is true
• religion is useful
• atheism is somehow corrosive of society or other values.
• The possibility that the universe always existed cannot be ruled out.
• Anyone who says, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” doesn’t understand what the word “atheist” means, or is simply insincere.
• Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism--hypothesis testing--that weeds out false claims.
• Science is a method of advancing our understanding. It is a process we can use to bring us closer to the truth and to weed out false claims. Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works. It should be jettisoned if something better comes along.
• Almost invariably discussion about the alleged benefits of faith are red herrings, distracting one from the main issue--whether or not faith can reliably help one to arrive at the truth.
• Conversations about whether or not faith is beneficial should only take place after your interlocutor explicitly states that faith is an unreliable path to truth.
• The more people who share a faulty process of reasoning the greater the magnification of potential harm.
• People use the Stalin/Hitler card in an attempt to argue that the worst dictatorships in recent times have had atheists at their helm. However, even granting this argument’s assumption, these men didn’t act like they did because they were atheists. That is, there nonbelief in a deity didn’t dictate particular actions they took. Their systems were horrific precisely because they resembled faith-based systems where suspending warrant for belief is required.
• A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person.
• Secular humanism is a philosophy and a set of ideas; atheism is simply the lack of belief in God or Gods.
• For Locke, liberalism means limited government, the rule of law, due process, liberty, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, separation of church and state, and separation of government powers into branches that oversee each other’s authority.
• The basic idea behind cultural relativism is that because everyone is always judging a culture from their own particular, situated cultural viewpoint, it’s therefore impossible to make reliable judgements about other cultures and cultural practices. This means that cultures and cultural practices cannot be judged.
• The fundamental idea behind multiculturalism is that different cultures can and ought to peacefully coexist.
• Contemporary academic leftism turned the rational analysis of criticizing a process one uses to know reality from an epistemological critique into a moral taboo.
• Tolerance only works when there’s reciprocity.
• Withholding epistemological critique is wrong and needs to end.
• Correcting students’ reasoning processes, and granting faith-based responses no countenance, needs to be the academic, cultural, and pedagogical norm across all academic disciplines.
• Cognitive, epistemological, and moral relativism are toxins that students trained in the humanities regularly consume in large doses.
• Questions:
• Is it possible that some people to misconstrue reality?
• Do some people misconstrue reality?
• If one wants to know reality, is one process just as good as any other
• So then are some processes bad?
• If so, this must mean some processes are good, or better.
• Is there a way we can figure out which processes are good, and which are not?
• Generally, praise is underused in advancing dialogue.
• For better or worse, putting the onus of action on someone usually ends the discourse, as most people won’t act beyond the initial contact.
• Historically, philosophy has focused on truth. Contemporary philosophy instead focuses on meaning. Meaning is subjective--it’s a turning away from the world and a turning toward our experience in the world and to the language we use to describe that experience.
• Too much tolerance entails abandoning critical judgement altogether.
• Tolerance does not, cannot, and should not mean having to submit to rules of belief systems to which one does not ascribe.
• When teaching, it’s important to frame issues not in terms of student understanding, but in terms of your explanation. This places the burden of clarity on [the instructor], and students are more likely to volunteer and engage issues if they don’t think that the instructor believes they have a problem understanding the material.
• Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue.
• People need to be comfortable with not knowing the future, and consequently take an activist stance: if you care about the future and you want something to get done--then do it. You cannot know the future, so take action.
• Make empirically verifiable claims, even if the conclusions are ugly, and you get to sit at the Adult Table. Wave an ancient text and expect others to cede to its authority, or claim faith as a justification for your beliefs--then you need to sit at the Kid’s Table.
• Give the faithful the same dialectical and conversational reciprocity they give you. Be honest. Be direct. Be blunt. Be unapologetic. Don’t complain, apologize, or mumble in the defense of reason. Don’t tone it down or talk baby talk. Instead, tell people exactly what you think and why you think it.
• Sincere, honest people are respected. People who are inauthentic and cower are not respected.
• To prevent doxastic closure it’s also important to read the work of noted apologists.
• The fact that children tend to track their parents’ religious beliefs is good news for atheist readers.
• There are no formulas guaranteed to create an atheists child, but raising a child as a critical thinker, a skeptic, a humanist, or a free thinker will most likely immunize her against delusional thinking and pretending to know things she doesn’t know.
• Act the way you want others--particularly your children--to act.
• Don’t make religion a forbidden fruit: acknowledge and read religious literature with your children, model the behavior you want them to emulate, genuinely listen, and gently encourage mutual examination of each other’s reasoning process.
• Currently, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) grants religious delusions an exemption from classification as a mental illness.
• Your offense means nothing to me. If you have arguments or evidence I’d like to hear what you have to say. You saying that you’re offended carries no weight. Nor should it.
• When myths are shown to be false, the result is a sense of despair because we’ve been dependent upon them for so long. The stop out of meaninglessness should not be dependency on a new myth, but self-sufficiency and a tough-mindedness that is weary of resting the sense of meaning on what someone else has said or done or promised.
• The sequence of escaping myth is: dependency, despair, reawakening, and self-sufficiency that embraces the value of tough-minded living.
• Socratic discussion questions:
• What is it to be a man?
• What is it to be virtuous?
• What is courage?
• Do people knowingly do bad things?
• What is justice?
• Are people responsible for who they become?
• Can a man be unjust toward himself?
• Can on be too modest?
• Why obey the law?
• What’s worth dying for?
• When is punishment justified?
• How important is personal responsibility?
• What does “character counts” mean?
• Are customs and conventions important?
• What kinds of customs and conventions are there?
• What’s the best life?
• What are the possible lives we can lead?
• Is the life of the tyrant the best life?
• How much control do we have over who we are?
• What obligations do we have toward others?
• What are the claims of loyalty and friendship?
• What are our obligations toward our families?
• What makes a way of life appealing to us?
• What attaches people to the way of life?
• Deepity - A statement that is seemingly profound yet trivial on one level and meaningless on the other.
• Knowledge claims must satisfy these three criteria: they must be justified, true, and believed.
• Meme - A concept that spread from one person to another.