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.
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.
Oh, no, not really; I think on the whole their reasons for believing what they do aren't very good, and that if their belief is justified it's mostly the result of epistemic luck rather than their personal epistemic abilities as such.
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 'largely-unconscious far-sighted social pragmatics'?"
Sorry, misinterpreted you. I think the question of "why do people generally (profess that they) believe what they (profess that they) believe" is a very interesting question and worth serious study, but that any simple answer I attempt to give will be laughably oversimplified.
My deconversion was significantly in motion prior to finding LessWrong
Okay, then my points re LessWrong don't apply at all. It's probable that my default model doesn't apply and that your reasons for deconversion are largely due to your philosophical and general epistemic intuitions.
...the actual deciding factors tend to be unconscious or sentimental drives.
How would I identify whether this is or is not the case, especially if they are unconscious?
By noticing conscious rationalization, mostly. That would at least clue you in that something funny is going on, if it is.
You continue to return to social/pragmatic aspects, which continues to leave me puzzled as to whether you think the Catholic Church's primary advantage is that it's most aligned with the wishes/truths concerning a god of some sort, or whether it's beliefs are just a side effect and what really matters is that it has the best social/pragmatic rules/suggestions for human beings of any competing religion.
I think that if you're trying to optimize for truthful and useful doctrine about morality and theology then Catholicism is the best bet unless you're astoundingly good at discovering the truth on your own. But I'm not highly confident in this judgment; you should learn from whoever is wise, and if for some reason the wisest person who's easily available is a Zen Buddhist, then you should likely become a Zen Buddhist. If there are no wise individual people around then I think Catholicism has the most reliably good infrastructure of doctrine, but again I may be wrong.
After reading all that, though, it still leaves me puzzled that a being who wants us to know about it would reveal itself (bible) in a time when we had none of these probability and game theories, and no formal study of social psychology.
If YHWH is around then He is indeed playing a subtle and puzzling game.
As in, you strike me as being rather confident in theism (or various theistic tenets) while typically offering very vague statements about specifically what they are
I'm not very confident of theism; I think it's a problem of English that it's very difficult to consistently make claims of >10% but <50% certainty. And what my intuitions say and what my betting odds are are two different things; I know better than to just trust my intuition. The reason my statements are so vague is because it would take a lot of writing to explain my intuitions about moral philosophy and decision theory to people on LessWrong whose perspective differs greatly from mine. Even people who have much of the relevant knowledge and who I would expect to easily see what I believe and why, like Vladimir_Nesov, seem to not really understand the underlying intuitions nor where they would lead if correct.
My read of this post/threads suggest that what happened is that you came out and asked "Why is theism wrong?" Then a bunch (like ~500) comments took place explaining various objections, and you concluded that everyone was attacking someone else's theism, which isn't what you hold or think is really theism.
I think that's a mischaracterization; many of the most highly upvoted comments agreed that it is possible that theism isn't wrong if by theism we mean simulationism (which is what I had contended), and the majority of the objections were along the lines of requesting that we not call simulationism by the name of theism, which is a reasonable request but not an objection to theism.
Perhaps a new post with specifics might help more (or point me to more of that if it already exists).
I think that local beliefs are stacked against mine to such an extent that an extreme burden of proof would be on me to provide strong justification and explanations for all of my claims, which just isn't feasible for me personally in the near future.
Thanks for the dialog.
You too; I'm glad there exists a place like LessWrong where a prospective Catholic convert and a prospective Catholic deconvert can have civil and productive discourse about epistemology and theology.
I'm enjoying this more and more. At first (and it was probably apparent), I was pretty defensive, particularly because this is obviously something personal and important and I felt a bit threatened. I think I (at least, maybe "we") have leveled off and are actually getting places now :)
if their belief is justified it's mostly the result of epistemic luck...
Well put, and we agree on that. Though your big bang cosmology example made me realize that this is more true in far more areas of my life than I am aware of (or even care to think about in...
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.