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synkarius comments on The annoyingness of New Atheists: declaring God Dead makes you a Complete Monster? - Less Wrong
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As a former theist myself, I have found that the most effective strategy is to argue with them from within their worldview and by their own rules. The reason for this is that they (in my experience) flatly reject any evidence external to their religion.
So, rather than discussing the existence of God, assume God exists and then point out that if God were a human, we'd call his motivations needy and depraved. Rather than bringing up outside savior myths which influenced the gospel writers, assume that the gospel is divinely inspired and then point out that it was divinely inspired in four different (contradictory) ways in the story about Mary visiting Jesus' tomb. There are plenty of these.
In my experience, this method is far more effective than outside evidence, but tends to lead to dismissals of logic itself, which is where I get frustrated. I try to explain that logic is embedded in language and thought, that to dismiss logic uses logic (albeit poorly), but I can't seem to make that point stick.
This comment puzzles me.
You have found that the most effective strategy, if you actually want to convince people of the truth of your position, is to argue from within their worldview and according to their rules. So far, so good... this is also my experience, of both theists and nontheists alike.
You have found that some people dismiss "logic itself," which you find (understandably) frustrating.
Given those two findings, the natural conclusion seems to be that the most effective strategy for convincing those people is to give up arguing from "logic," discover what it is they are using instead, and argue from whatever that is.
Instead, you seem to ignore your own first paragraph and try to convince them using the selfsame "logic" that they dismiss.
Why do you expect that to work?
That's a rather good point. I suppose I assumed that everyone (on some gut level) endorses logic, that it was just my failure to communicate my point clearly, not that they were viewing logic as external in the same way they did the other evidence.
Yet, I don't see where to go from here. Without getting some sort of commitment to logic, anything I say using any methodology can be rejected for no reason.
Perhaps I ought to use scriptures to show that God endorses logic? Hmm. What a twisted path that is.
If they really are rejecting logic in its entirety, as you suggest, then they have insulated themselves from being forced into accepting conclusions they don't want to accept simply because they follow from premises they've previously accepted, so any attempt to convince them that depends on that sort of force will simply fail.
It seems to follow that, if you want them to accept your beliefs, you will have to induce them to want to accept those beliefs.
All of that said, I'm somewhat skeptical that this is actually what they've done, although of course I don't know the people you're talking about.
No, you're right about that. They're not rejecting logic. They use it (selectively). They're just saying "I reject logic" as a tactic to stopsign any arguments in which they get cornered.
I like the idea of getting them to want to accept my beliefs. That's a rather large task though, isn't it? I'm not quite sure how I managed it myself. Sure, now I look back and say, "what a dreadful and frustrating perspective that was in comparison", and now the beauty of what we might achieve without a god, and the natural world, are overwhelming, but how to get that across?
My general answer to that question is here.
In this specific context, I would recommend thinking carefully about what made you want to change your beliefs, assuming you did want to. If you can figure that out and articulate it, you may find that other people in the same position you were in will react to it the same way.
I actually didn't want to. It was more of an overwhelming evidence deconversion. But I was willing to look at that evidence because I had a strong desire to be a defender of light, to boldly face the philosophical abyss of unbelief--- for God.
Yet there was a key difference somewhere between what I did and what I see a lot of believers do. I read enemy texts, not just friendly texts on enemy ideas. Why did I, in that frame of mind, do that? That might be the thing to figure out and then articulate, as you put it.
Have you known this method to ultimately result in theists changing their religious views, and not just their views on logic?
That is true in my experience. I find it somewhat frustrating that I have to argue by picking apart the Bible and defending evolutionary biology instead of by talking about reductionism and Kolmogorov complexity, but the former is what seems to work. (Quoting myself from elsewhere: "I find that deconversions begin more often from a person noticing some internal absurdity in their beliefs than from having the problems in their epistemology explained to them. It’s only once they find they can’t run away from some counterexample to their beliefs that they are willing to consider why such a counterexample is allowed to exist.")