How useful is dialogue?
One of the things that’s made me too exhausted to blog lately is a real-world manifestation of some of my blogly endeavors. I’ve been having these long, philosophical conversations with some of my Christian friends about exactly what their religion means to them (I was happy to find that these friends were open to such discussions!) and I read an extremely large portion of the Bible over the course of about a week in order to be more informed. My original goal in this was to broaden my own horizons and understand how intelligent people justify unproven and unfounded beliefs to themselves, and if I was lucky, to communicate some appreciation of how atheists are capable of being thoughtful, moral people even while not believing in God and/or Jesus. I’m not sure I got anywhere.
What I’m sure I succeeded at is making myself much more angry about problems with Christianity and religion in general that I used to just chuckle at and toss aside, and much more frustrated with people who I know are smart enough to analyze complex ideas but who seem unable to escape the mental compartment they’ve built around their religious beliefs. There’s no way that people’s moral beliefs are actually formed by Christianity’s teachings, because they’re able to cast out any unsavory (to them) messages and follow only the ones they like, but they can’t see this in themselves. They construct elaborate webs of language that prevent them from noticing any contradictions in their ideas or behavior. This same web deflects any questions I might ask, turning the conversation into a meandering stream of non-answers and platitudes. Aside from this, I had just read all the nasty things that the Bible says about nonbelievers and was trying to start some dialogue about that, but they all seemed indifferent to its offensiveness.
At the same time, I’m sure they mean well. They genuinely do believe what it is they’re claiming to, and it’s difficult to question what you really do perceive to be undeniably true. Sam Harris recently published a paper on this, which I read about over at Friendly Atheist. The basic outcome of the study, which used fMRI while asking participants to respond to statements as either true or false, was that the brain responds the same way to “regular” facts as it does to religious beliefs. That is to say, a believer knows the fact of God’s existence and a nonbeliever knows the fact of God’s nonexistence in the same way, neurologically, that they both know that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet.
So what are we supposed to do? Keep on ignoring it? I don’t feel like I can ignore it when politicians justify their laws based on their supposedly religious morality, when people proclaim their religious judgments in everyday conversation, when people come up to me as I walk around campus and shove papers about Bible study groups in my face, heck, when I have to look at people’s happy T-shirt slogans and Facebook status updates about how Jesus loves everybody and prayer will fix everything. If everybody else gets to express their side, I want to express mine. At the same time, the dialogue seems futile. Nobody’s going to change their mind, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re speaking the same language. It just makes me exhausted and depressed, and obviously that’s no good either.
What do you think?
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7 Responses to “How useful is dialogue?”
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Sometimes I think a lot of the same things. People clearly aren’t being won over by rational arguments most of the time – it’s emotional fallacies that people want. Religious folks still tend to see atheists as evil heathens with no purpose. Only if we provide secular alternatives to church will we substantially grow our numbers. It doesn’t help though that the majority of atheist/skeptic groups are predominantly white-males.
I think you’re right that the more the freethinking community actually functions like a community, the more people will be “won over” to that side. There are undoubtedly people who go to church because they like being with other people, they like singing together, they like the potlucks and the coffee hours, and they’re not that big into the whole God thing but they’ll believe whatever they have to about it in order to fit in and have friends.
So maybe I should be focusing my efforts on that. But does that mean I should stop wasting my time even talking to the True Believers about it?
“Religious folks still tend to see atheists as evil heathens with no purpose.”
Statistics, plox. Else it’s just the same kind of generalization “religious folks” heap upon atheists (that they are all purpose-lacking.)
…
I rather enjoy these two religious men’s explanation of their faith in God.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80UXZi7F74
Note: I did not say “I COMPLETELY AGREE WITH EVERYTHING THEY SAY NO QUESTIONS ASKED NO TAG-BACKS” – I just like what they say about their belief in God.
I think it’s a bit fatalistic to say that you will never convert someone to atheism through dialogue, it’s rare but it does happen and even if it doesn’t go all the way, it can sometimes act as a nudge.
But dialogue is valuable because it changes people’s minds about many peripheral issues. The religious people I’ve conversed with now believe:
Atheists are capable of having a moral system as deeply genuine as theirs
Atheists are far from certain about their belief and operate from a position of deep doubt
Not all Atheists are hostile towards religion
Atheists arrived at their position from careful thought and not a reflexive fear of God
Some people have had religious transcendent experiences & still remain unbelievers
The evidence for creationism is far weaker than they assumed
If you get two Atheists together, you’ll get 3 opinions on any issue, Atheism is not a single creed
On the other side, I’ve learned:
Many religious people are smart, curious and have a well thought out & internally coherent belief system.
Religion is an experiential phenomena & it’s hard for me to comment if I haven’t experienced God’s touch
Liberal Christians aren’t by any means wishy washy about their faith and they’re as deeply committed as fundamentalist Christians but choose to express their faith in different ways
Religion does drive a compulsion to do good and love thy neighbor which is in excess of what I see in Atheist communities
When I help run dialogue discussions, it’s with the goal of understanding, not conversion.
[...] Debate Between Believers And Non-Believers Inevitably Futile? It’s The Thought That Counts gets discouraged: I’ve been having these long, philosophical conversations with some of my [...]
I often feel the same way; but then I read deconversion stories, and it becomes clear that at least some few people are prompted to think carefully by something that was said to them for which they didn’t really have a good answer (though they may have given an answer at the time)… you don’t know what effect you may have in the longer term, nor how long it may take to kick in.
But it’s probably not as futile as it seems. We are not going to magically deconvert the whole world in one generation, but the fact that atheist ideas are being openly promoted is something that has not happened before, outside intellectual circles. That may make an enormous difference in the medium term.