I'm not sure if this is precisely the correct forum for this, but if there is a better place, I don't know what it would be. At any rate...
I'm a student a Catholic university, and there are (as one might surmise) quite a lot of Catholics here, along with assorted other theists (yes, even some in the biology faculty). For this reason, I find myself acquiring more and more devoutly Catholic friends, and some of them I have grown quite close to. But the God issue keeps coming up for one reason or another, which is a source of tension. And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
So the question is this: in what situations (if any) is it ethical to push such buttons? We often say, here, that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but these are people who have built their lives around faith, people for whom the Church is their social support group. If it were possible to disillusion the whole world all at once, that'd be one thing - but in this case my options are limited to changing the minds of only the specific individuals I have spent time getting to know, and the direct result would be their alienation from the entire community in which they've been raised.
And yet it is the truth.
I'm conflicted. LessWrong, what is your opinion?
Even if it were just a matter of telling the truth, I don't think it would be ethically unambiguous. The more general question is whether the value of increasing some person's net-true-beliefs stat outweighs the corresponding decrease in that person's ability-to-fit-comfortably-in-theist-society stat. In other words I am questioning WHETHER they would be better off, not which conditional I should thereafter follow.
Yes, if all you care about is whether they would be better off, then it's merely an empirical question.
Normally that's the end of the conversation for a philosopher, but I shall go on. Based on nothing, I'd say they'd be better off. They should just find a new atheist society. With blackjack and hookers.