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This.. reads to me like a Chick tract more than anything else. I just don't believe J will be that easy to manipulate.
What's unreasonable about Chick tracts, I think, is that strangers can't really walk up and manipulate you like that unless you're already in an extremely emotionally vulnerable state. It's easier if there's an established relationship.
Just out of curiosity, do you have the obvious ulterior motive here?
Yes. Which is a very good reason for me not to trust my inclinations.
It's very believable. I'll give a couple of techniques here.
Reinforce skeptical behavior while modifying their self-image to that of a truth-seeker: "I love talking to you because you pursue the truth over comforting lies". Be genuine, and by that I mean use the tone you would use to tell someone that their suit looks good.
Give high-status cues. Assume the role of teacher or mentor. Once they want to become more like you, merely expressing your beliefs (not opposing theirs, but expressing yours) will make a significant impact.
Demonstrate that giving up religious belief won't result in isolation. How exactly you do this will vary based on the social context.
There are a couple others, such as generating low-status associations with religion, which is a bit advanced and so not worth covering here, and creating false memories and comittments, which is scarily easy to do but absolutely dark arts and therefore not covered here.
You will note the absence of "rational argument" on this list. That's because rational argument is rather ineffective for changing the mind of the person you are arguing with (though it may change the views of observers).
Does LessWrong have an actual primer on the Dark Arts anywhere? There's a lot of discussion of Defense Against, but I haven't seen any Practice Of... Perhaps that's beyond the scope of what we really intend to teach here?
Aha! I think I was misreading your post, then; I assumed you were presenting truth-seeking as a reason why you wanted your friends to be atheists, as well as a reason why converting them would be moral. Sorry for assuming you didn't know your own motivations!
Heavens, no. I want my friends to be atheists for purely selfish reasons. It so happens that some of those selfish reasons involve things like "I want my friends to know what's true", but most of them are reasons like "I want this awkward piece of the relationship gone" and "It's a shame none of you believe in casual premarital sex, because I could really go for an orgy right now" and "If I have to hear you talk about how wrong gay marriage is ONE MORE TIME I do declare I shall explode."
In other words, I really do not trust my personal desires as an ethical system, because in a vacuum I'm a pretty unmitigated asshole.
But if you would like an example of what I'd say to a specific person (currently there are three to whom I know what I would say), I can do that. Let me know.
Yes, this sounds very intriguing. So, you have a model of their thinking good enough to predict how such conversation would go? Would you be willing to describe it here and then try it IRL (if you deem it appropriate) and report what happened?
I'm going to describe such a conversation (the first of what would, I think, be many) for a girl who I will call Jane, though that is not her name. Some background: Jane is a devout Catholic, an altar girl, a theology major, a performer of the singing-acting-dancing type, and one of the bubbliest people I know. She is also firmly against gay marriage, abortion, premarital sex, and consumption of alcohol or other drugs (though for some reason she has no problem with consumption of shellfish). You may have read the previous two sentences and thought "there's a lot of sexual repression going on there" and you would be quite correct, though she would never admit that. Here is what I would say and do. Don't take the wording too literally; I'm not that good.
tld: (At an appropriate moment) Jane, I have a very personal question for you.
J: Okay, shoot.
tld: It's about God.
J: Oh dear. I'm listening.
tld: So God exists. And he's up there, somewhere, shouting down that he loves us. But if tomorrow morning he suddenly vanished - just ceased to exist, packed up and left town, whatever - would you want to know?
J: I - uh - gosh. That would go against everything God's said, about how he would never abandon us- tld: I know. But just think of it as a counterfactual question. God leaves, or vanishes. Do you want to know? J: I don't know. It's - I just can't imagine that happening.
tld: taking Jane's hand, gentle smile Hey. Don't let it rattle you. Just remember, here in the real world, God's up there somewhere, and he loves us, and he would never abandon us.
J: I love hearing you say that.
tld: Sure. So in the real world, nothing to worry about. But over there in the imaginary, fake world - God vanishes. Would you want to know?
J: Well... I guess so. Because otherwise it's just living a lie, isn't it?
tld: Right. squeeze hand softly I'm glad you agree, it's very brave and honest of you to be able to say that. So the follow-up question is, what would change, in that world?
J: What do you mean?
tld: Well, God was there, and now he's left that world behind. So it's a world without God - what changes, what would be different about the world if God weren't in it?
J: I can't imagine a world without God in it.
tld: Well, let's look at it the other way, then. Let's imagine another world, just like the first two except that it never had a God in the first place, and then God shows up. He came from the other world, the first one we imagined, to give this new world some of His light, right? reassuring squeeze
J: squeeze back Okay...
tld: So God comes into this new world, and the first thing he does is make it a better place, right? That's what God does, he makes the world a better place.
J: Yeah! Yeah, exactly. God makes the world a better place.
tld: So God comes down himself, or sends down His son, and feeds the poor and heals the sick, and pretty soon the world is better off because God is there.
J: Of course.
tld: Great! smile So let's think about the other world, the one that got left behind, for a second. What would you do, if you were there?
J: What? (shocked)
tld: Well, the you in the other world finds out there's no God anymore, and that's that. So what would you do? lean in, squeeze hand again There must be some things you'd dare to do that you wouldn't otherwise.
J: pause, blush Um. Well. I don't know. I'd have to think about it.
tld: Right, it's a hard question. final hand squeeze, lean back But I hope you'll think about it, for the next time we talk, and let me know what you've come up with. I've actually got to run, it's getting kind of late (or other excuse for why I need to leave, etc)
Proceed to wait until she brings the subject up again, or bring it up again later myself.
So, yes. The above conversation has two purposes, which are (a) to plant the idea of dealing with a world where God doesn't exist, and (b) to remind Jane that there are things she wants but can't have because of her faith so that she has a reason, though unspoken, to want to be rid of it; there are a couple of other things going on as well which I'm sure faul_sname will cringe at, but that's the gist. Intended arc of development: A few months' worth of working on a truth-seeking mindset, possibly more work on building rapport and position-of-authority mojo, and eventually the Jenga moment, which it's difficult to plan out precisely in advance. And yes, I realize that playing on sexual tension to manipulate someone's beliefs is, in a word, disgusting. I did say Dark Arts for a reason.
The other two people who've been weighing on my mind are let's-call-him-James and let's-call-her-Mary, for whom the intended sequence is a little different (neither of them has an easily-accessible repressed-sexuality motivator) but you get the idea, I think.
I just caught myself rationalizing ways to prove that deconverting them would be the right thing, so that I could see the results of this experiment.
I caught myself doing more or less the same thing (but for substantially eviller reasons), which is why I asked LW in the first place.
In response to
The ethics of breaking belief
I think you (and most commenters) are treating this hypothetical believer in a rather disrespectful and patronizing fashion. I would think the ethical thing to do is to engage in a meta-discussion with such a person and see whether there are certain subjects that are off limits, how they feel about your differing views on God, how they would feel about losing their faith, etc. They might ask you similar questions about what might make you become a believer. You might find yourself incorrect about what might make them lose their belief.
It's certainly possible to remain in a religious community without one's faith intact -- I think it happens to a large percentage of people in any religious group. Consider all the European Catholics who are essentially atheists.
In fact I have attempted such meta-discussion. Unfortunately it's very difficult to get a straight answer to questions like that; people will almost always CLAIM to care about the truth, but that's also what they would claim if they merely thought they cared and didn't reflect enough on it to know otherwise.
The possibility that I am incorrect about what would make them lose their belief is a very real one; I used to think that merely repeating the things that broke MY faith in God would work on everyone, and that was clearly wrong. Still, I'd give p>.33 for success, and thus expect it to work on at least one of the three people I'm writing about.
In response to
The ethics of breaking belief
It really depends on your own personal moral system (assuming ethical relativism). In order to answer your question, I would need to know what you consider moral. I'll attempt to infer your morals from your post, and then I'll try to answer your question accordingly.
It sounds from your post like you're torn between two alternatives, both of which you consider moral, but which are mutually exclusive. On one hand, it seems that you're morally devoted to the causes of atheism and truth-seeking; thus, you desire to convert others to this cause. But on the other hand, you're morally devoted to your friends' happiness, and you realize that if they do become atheists, then they will lose their social grounding (not to mention the emotional benefits they receive from being religious).
It sounds like you're very devoted to truth-seeking, and that you believe atheism to be the truth. (Side-note: as a Bayesian, I distrust anyone who claims to know "the truth". The point of Bayesianism is that we don't know the truth; all we have are probabilities, and thus we can approach the truth but never attain it.) Anyway, given your devotion to truth-seeking, I would expect you to want to avoid Dark Arts-ish methods. If atheism is true, then we (and your Catholic friends) should want to believe that atheism is true, but we should want to believe it because of empirical evidence and rational argument, not based on the words of some authority figure (especially since authority figures have proven unreliable in the realm of religion).
If you deconvert your friends using Dark Arts-ish methods, but you don't teach them the virtues of truth-seeking, then atheism will become just another religion to them, handed down by new authority figures (you and "Science", for instance). They'll accept atheism in the same way they accepted religion: with blind faith. If your goal is truth-seeking, then you should want to teach your friends skepticism, not atheism. And if you're so interested in converting your friends to atheism that you would sacrifice the virtues of truth-seeking, perhaps you should re-examine your motivations.
You note that the God issue is a source of tension between you and your friends; thus, I suspect that you want your friends to be athiests because it would relieve social tensions, not because you are devoted to spreading the virtues of truth-seeking. Because you are considering using the Dark Arts, it seems to me that your appeal to truth-seeking is a rationalization. So what you're really asking is, "Is it moral to make my friends' lives very difficult in order to relieve a social tension that I find unpleasant?" Most moral systems would say "no".
Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair to you. Perhaps your true goal is to encourage truth seeking, but it's easier to convert atheists to truth-seekers than it is Catholics. Or perhaps you believe that atheism will make the world a better place by eliminating holy wars and other problems caused by religion. If that's the case, then I apologize for the harshness of this analysis. Also, fwiw, my personal moral system says that converting your friends to atheism would be wrong, so I'm likely to be biased. Take this (and everything else in life, of course) with a grain of salt, and good luck to you with whatever you decide to do. =)
You're absolutely right that my primary motivation is simply that I WANT to do it. But ethical reasoning is about what is right in spite of my preferences, is it not? So the question of truth-versus-negative-consequences remains an important one.
Your point about truth-seeking versus atheism as a religion is a very good one. I do generally think that converting atheists to truth-seekers is easier than converting Catholics to truth-seekers, but I had not considered the possibility that I might, rather than failing entirely (which is not unlikely), fail at the halfway point and end up with atheist zealots for friends, which would DEFINITELY create more problems than it would solve.
That was a very thoughtful piece of advice. Thank you.
But if you would like an example of what I'd say to a specific person (currently there are three to whom I know what I would say), I can do that. Let me know.
Yes, this sounds very intriguing. So, you have a model of their thinking good enough to predict how such conversation would go? Would you be willing to describe it here and then try it IRL (if you deem it appropriate) and report what happened?
Absolutely, contingent on being able to convince myself it's ethical to do so. Give me a moment to do some typing and I'll outline how I think one such conversation sequence would go.
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I am stealing this clause.
If it shows up in Elcenia, I do declare I shall explode from pure joy.