My sad prediction: Few will read past the title page. Maybe as far as the first paragraph.
Why? Because you're implying that them being wrong about everything is possible. This generates an ugh field of overwhelming strength.
Likely results: nothing you say in the paper will be taken in by your intended audience. Worse, they will read as far as that first paragraph and then fill in the blanks with their received preconceptions of atheists. If they discuss your apostasy amongst themselves, it will be in terms of said stereotypes, and nothing to do with anything you've actually said, written or thought, ever. Perhaps I'm being unduly pessimistic ...
The document is worth having for yourself. I expect some will read it and actually take you seriously. This will make it worth it.
Edit: I've just realised the above falls afoul of "plausible is the opposite of probable" - a compelling story of a possible outcome is strictly less probable the more details you add. Still feels like an outcome of sufficient likelihood to be prepared for, though. (Am I wrong there?)
What is the objective you're trying to achieve with this document ?
Neither are nor my close family members have never been religious, so it's hard for me to put myself into your target audience's shoes. Still, if I did something radical, like joining a snake-handling Pentecostal cult; and if I chose to announce my decision by way of a 10-page, single-spaced document full of scholarly references; then I would expect my family members to feel hurt. They'd expect me to talk to them on a more personal level.
Those are just my two cents, though.
My immediate gut reaction (to your first paragraph) is that you're trying for a deeply profound style, and that makes me want to stop reading. I understand exactly why that feels like the right style for an account of apostasy, but it's infinitely better to be as basic and plain-spoken as you would be in a casual conversation. (After all, you're not trying to win a prize for style or satisfy the requirements of academics, you're trying to help your friends to see and respect where you're coming from.) Edit your first page until you can read it out loud to a stranger and have it sound like natural speech.
If you want to know how religious people will react to it, it might be helpful to get feedback from religious people.
Very well written piece. I enjoyed reading it.
The parts discussing the evidence on the historical existence of Jesus are likely to be the most provocative parts, and they are practically the first thing you discuss. I understand that this was an important part of your de-conversion process, but if there were a way you could eliminate or delay this discussion, I think it would be helpful in preventing your intended audience from being turned off by the writing.
That's inspiring, and beautiful. You should be very, very proud of your rationality, adherance to the Socratic method, and your determination to create and maintain a happy marriage and beautiful life. I know you will achieve your goals. You deserve to.
I found it pretty readable and interesting, though most of what was new to me was how you were treated by a lot of the religious people you know. I was surprised that Jesus not making more of a splash in his own time was that important to you.
How are you and your wife handling your children's (ir)religious education?
I was going to recommend Julia Sweeney, too.
I hope you make your final version available as HTML as well as PDF so I can link people to it - thanks!
I have a low attention span but I read through your entire document and when I reached the end I was surprised because I had the impression I was still reading the preliminary part. So, for what it's worth, I found it easy to get through.
Upvoted for honesty, and for conscientiously documenting it in a very readable format, and for courage. Of course, we who already choose to read LessWrong are not the intended recipients of this message -- we're the choir, and don't need to be preached to. We've arrived at this forum from many different backgrounds, along many different paths. You came from Roman Catholicism. Eliezer came from Judaism. Some LessWrongers were never religious at all.
Your message is not to us, but to your own friends and family, who remain active believing Catholics. By co...
Good read. I think that's a description of an intellectual journey, if is not so similar to EY or Luke, maybe is the beggining. Joining in the Bayesian Conspiracy put you in a good path. Rationalists should win.
I enjoyed reading that. I spotted a few grammatical errors, so I will offer this: if you make this available to me as a Google Document and give me commenting rights, I will go through it within the next week with my editor hat on and mark up everything I think should be changed. Even if you don't want to do that, good job: that was a fairly enjoyable read and will probably do what you want it to as is.
Don't take this the wrong way at all, but I did not read all of it; it was not interesting enough. (I read three pages) But that is due primarily to a complete disinterest in religion, nothing else. It was very well written, and I suspect that my apathy wouldn't apply to your target audience.
For what it's worth, congratulations on taking the time to write all of this out so that you can explain to people. It is imaginably a very difficult thing to do for someone in your situation.
If you don't accept my apostasy as legit, do you accept the beliefs of most of your fellow Catholics as such?
I don't accept them as individually providing very much evidence at all; in the vast majority of cases other factors screen off any evidence.
...the default explanation for conversion, i.e. largely-unconscious far-sighted social pragmatics...
Could you provide some more specifics? Like I want to sin or don't like my friends or what?
Well it's a default explanation so I don't have anything for you specifically in mind. But that you're a member of LessWrong means there's a fair bit of pressure on you to believe whatever LessWrong thinks it's good to believe, and if your brain has decided that you're not getting much benefit or a feeling of recognition and status from the Catholic social sphere then it's liable to find ways to play up the importance of meshing with alternative social spheres like LessWrong. I don't deny that you've searched for truth in good faith, but you can search in good faith for ages and still be unsure what to do; the actual deciding factors tend to be unconscious or sentimental drives.
I think you'd have to be at a Michael Vassar or Nick Tarleton level...
And are they Catholic or non-religious? If non-religious... do you accept their apostasy?
I think they are both religious in the relevant sense, but not specifically Catholic. I accept their non-Catholicism as evidence against something but not really against the truth of Catholicism as such; it's more evidence against the benefit of tying yourself to Catholicism specifically rather than trying to forge a new religion. I think they have more agency than I do right now and so I don't think their non-Catholicism is much evidence that I'd be wrong to convert to Catholicism or that they think that I'd be wrong to convert to Catholicism. Ultimately I would like to make a new religion, which is I think what they'd like to do, but in the meantime I think Catholicism is the best religion around. I think this idea of a religion being true or false is clearly misguided; it's more a question of how you interpret the world and what institutions allow for more and more-justified optimization of the world, which is heavily contingent on pragmatics of human psychology.
While I'm not smart enough to do it (yet), I would love to see a Bayesian analysis (since you mentioned it) on the probability that a god who values the salvation of souls in the highest degree would require the subject comprehension and intellectual dedication you demand to order to believe (or not). Or require the words of a book spread on foot as the only means toward knowing which specific god is real. Or even that given one true god, the other fake ones would also use the means of an inspired text to spread knowledge of themselves.
This is why I emphasized social psychology and game theory, because doing thorough analyses of questions like these is simply too difficult. We have to find a way to take people's impressions and cultural traditions and use them correctly as evidence, because so much thought has implicitly gone into answering questions like these that there's no easy way to directly access. And maybe the way we're posing the questions involves presuppositions that aren't in fact accurate, e.g. maybe we think that others believe something that they only say they believe when really they believe this other thing that is more reasonable but if we deny the former then that means unjustifiably denying the latter. This sort of thing happens constantly, and without very good models of social psychology, game theory, cognitive science, and hermeneutics generally we simply can't even come close to getting the right answers.
Oh, and I meant to ask: feel free to provide links/references to what you find most convincing concerning theism.
I don't think there are references that explain the sorts of things that got me interested in theism in the first place, specifically various intuitions about moral philosophy and decision theory. After I had those I could look into Kant or Aquinas and be impressed, but I don't know if I would have realized the depth of their arguments if I hadn't thought about the moral philosophy and decision theory on my own first.
I don't accept them as individually providing very much evidence at all...
Hard to tell what you meant. I didn't mean to ask whether you accept their belief as providing evidence for theism... only whether or not you think their belief is justified given the level of knowledge you expect from me not to believe.
Well it's a default explanation so I don't have anything for you specifically in mind.
But I still don't understand the meaning of that default explanation... and so I just meant "what types of things count as fitting the definition of 'lar...
Edited 3/4/2012: I shortened up the summary a bit and add the following update:
Thanks for the lively comments. As a preliminary summary of things I've found quite useful/helpful:
It's almost one year later, and I've finally made tangible progress on some of the input suggested in my post about being non-religious in a primarily religious environment. That is, I have a near-final draft of a "coming out" statement I plan to share with a majority of those who know me.
I was involved in two religious communities for about six years of my life (SPO and CCR). Two years post-deconversion from Catholicism, many of them still do not know I no longer believe in god. This can make for awkward interactions for myself, as well as for my wife, who's still a believer. She thought it would be helpful if everyone was on the same page, as did I.