You say you want to convince people "without having to shorten all of the freaking Inferential Distance". Yet you seem not to realize that to do so would be to practice a Dark Art.
Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren't actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam's Razor and Bayesian statistics. I've tried shortcuts, such as saying "it's just like how a patient is usually less qualified to diagnose their symptoms than a doctor," but that has never succeeded in conveying the message. If someone doesn't actually understand why entities shouldn't be multiplied beyond necessity and how to use evidence to evaluate claims, they're not going to accept what you say about their claims. We can keep trying to explain these concepts, and I do, but they have to decide they want to learn them.
*It's usually much more than just that, because religious people tend to come from a very anthropocentric worldview, where morality is objective, life has inherent meaning, human beings have souls, etc. We might speak the same language, but we're using very different systems of thought.
Edit to add: Eliezer has a very good post on this subject which makes the point better than I did: it's not enough just to cite Occam's Razor, Bayes' Theorem, etc.; there has to be understanding. Importantly, developing that understanding requires taking doubt seriously.
Even when it's explicitly pointed out, some people seemingly cannot follow the leap from the object-level "Use Occam's Razor! You have to see that your God is an unnecessary belief!" to the meta-level "Try to stop your mind from completing the pattern the usual way!"
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If "Occam's Razor!" is your usual reply, your standard reply, the reply that all your friends give - then you'd better block your brain from instantly completing that pattern, if you're trying to instigate a true crisis of faith.
Better to think of such rules as, "Imagine what a skeptic would say - and then imagine what they would say to your response - and then imagine what else they might say, that would be harder to answer."
Or, "Try to think the thought that hurts the most."
And above all, the rule:
"Put forth the same level of desperate effort that it would take for a theist to reject their religion."
Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren't actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam's Razor and Bayesian statistics.
Empirically many people deconvert for reasons that have nothing to do with Bayesianism. Indeed most former theists I know don't even know what Bayesianism is. If this is what it would take then almost no one would ever deconvert. People can deconvert for many different reasons. Occam's Razor or Bayesianism can be reasons, but there a...
I have noticed during my dialectic adventures on the Grid that religious people, no matter how "reasonable" (i.e. moderate, unaggressive, unassuming, gentle, etc.), would get very annoyed by an assertive, dry Atheist perspective, which they tend to nickname Hollywood Atheist (interestingly, religious people tend to use this term to atheists that openly make fun of religion and are very assertive and even preachy about their disbelief, while atheists tend to use it to mean people who are atheists for shallow, weak reasons and who do a poor job of defending their stance in an argument). There is also the tendency to compare the certainty of an Atheist with that of a Fundamentalists, when they are fundamentally different in nature (pun unintended), something they do not seem to be able or willing to grasp. Not that atheism hasn't had its fair share of fundamentalists, but that's supposedly the difference between an atheist who is so out of rationalism and one that is so because they hate the Church or because Stalin (glorified be his name) told them to.
On of the things that irritate them the most is the phrase "God is Dead". A phrase that is obviously meaningless in a literal sense (although, of course, God was never a living being in the first place, by the current definition). Figuratively, it means something akin to "Our Father is dead": we are now orphans, adults, we don't need a God to tell us what to do, or what to want, or how to see the world: we decide for ourselves, we see for ourselves, we are now free... but it does feel a bit lonely, and, for those who relied on their God or Parent Figure as a crutch, it can be hard to adapt to a world without a reference, without an authority figure. A world where you are the reference, you are responsible for your own moral choices.
There are other things, specific arguments, methods of approach, that anger them and are counterproductive to the submitting of the message. Of course, the atheist message is a Brown Note of sorts to the religious mind, since it challenges their entire worldview (though in the end it all adds up to normality... except much more seamlessly). However, it would be nice to develop an approach towards theists that avoids the frontal part of their mental shields and gets into the seams, using the minimal force in the points of maximum efficiency, bypassing their knee-jerk defences...
So, here is my question to you all: how do you get your points across to a theist without pushing any of their Berserk Buttons, without coming off as a condescending and dismissive jerk, and without having to shorten all of the freaking Inferential Distance?
Developing a general algorithm would help us spread our ideals further, which, as far as I know, we think will be to the benefit of all humanity and might in fact help us avoid extinction. So, suggestions...