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Normal_Anomaly comments on The annoyingness of New Atheists: declaring God Dead makes you a Complete Monster? - Less Wrong
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I guess, if you had a theist friend whose quality of life you think would be improved by greater rationality, the way to do it would be to talk about general rationality (The Simple Truth, Bayes, Occam, etc), then move on to reductionism, and once they'd accepted and understood all that, and seemed to think of rationality as a good thing, to point out cautiously the implications for the existence of God.
Essentially, shorten the inferential distance, preferably before they know you're an atheist. Then when they think of you as a sane person, and think of themselves as a sane person, point out that sanity means atheism. It takes a while, and I haven't tested it, but it's more likely to work than one conversation, especially if the theist is deep in Dark Side Epistemology.
That seems like a very good way to go about it, as long as the topic of conversation isn't religion. A certain but slow way.
How do I hold their attention all that time, though? The advantage of offending or provoking is that people listen
You don't hold their attention all that time. Rather, you say what there is to say as moments arise when there's value in saying it.
And yes, it takes time.
The perceived advantage of offending or provoking derives from the fact that it makes us feel important and powerful. But unless feeling powerful is our goal, that's just a distraction.
I've known a fair number of theists to renounce their religion due to persuasive arguments, and in every case I'm aware of, it took a long time and many conversations. If there's a faster way that's effective, I've never seen it at work.