Why Atheists Should Consider Discussing Religion With Their Moderately Religious Friends

This is an absolutely amazing post on perhaps the most important issue facing atheists today: how to deal with religious moderates (especially friends). You care for your friends, and you don’t want to push your views on them, but at the same time you don’t want them to believe in unfounded concepts such as life after death, castles in the sky, virgin birth, chupacabras, or teapots orbiting Mars. It’s a dilemma. How do you deal with it? How do you point out to a friend or aquaintance that this stuff is silly without being an asshole? Here’s an excerpt:

Certainly, religious moderates themselves don’t silently tolerate the obviously unsubstantiated views of others. Just listen to religious moderates speak up when they hear others publicly espousing beliefs in such things as Bigfoot, the existence of ESP or astrology. Imagine a public official talking about his use of astrology at a press conference. Can you imagine an audience of religious moderates staying politely silent, thereby broadcasting the false idea that there was nothing inappropriate about the official’s belief in astrology? It encourages continued bad mental hygiene to fail to speak up when others make claims that aren’t based in fact. Failing to speak up harms society in yet another important way. Allowing each other to utter baseless things without protest degrades the quality of relationships. It erodes our trust in each other. Consider this true-life example. Many years ago, an acquaintance I’ll call Karen had a tumultuous break-up with Joe, her boyfriend. She was deeply hurt by Joe’s refusal to see her anymore. For several years after that break-up, Karen repeatedly told me that Joe hadn’t really broken up with her. She held to this bizarre conclusion despite the fact that Joe completely stopped calling her and never tried to see Karen again. She held to her bizarre opinion despite the fact that when Karen took the initiative and called Joe, he repeatedly told her such things as “I don’t ever want to see you again” and “I’m dating someone else now” and “I’ll call the police if you don’t leave me alone.” She admitted all of this to me. Despite the plain meaning of Joe’s words and actions, Karen continued to believe that Joe still loved her deeply. She claimed that Joe would call her and let her phone ring once then hang up (this is before caller ID), but she “knew” it was Joe. She claimed that Joe would sometimes sneak out to her house in the early morning to move Karen’s newspaper from her lawn up to her porch. She never saw him do that, but she “knew” Joe did it. He did these things, Karen said, because he was trying hard to subtlely communicate to her that he still loved her and he wanted to be with her. He just couldn’t get up the nerve to deal with this “difficult issue” face to face, she said. He was shy and introverted and confused, she said. Karen was highly successful in her challenging profession, arguably brilliant. In our conversations, though, she periodically brought up Joe, and tried to get me to agree with her claim that Joe still loved her. I listened patiently at first, thinking that I was missing something, then I started expressing doubts, which caused Karen to become dramatically frustrated with me that I didn’t “get it.” She desperately clung to her belief that Joe still loved her and was still wooing her in these bizarre ways. No evidence would have convinced her otherwise. Outside of that single strange issue of Joe, Karen and I continued to have a fruitful (yet strained) friendship based upon intellectual ideas we shared. It became apparent that I couldn’t easily convince Karen that Joe didn’t love her. Yet I continued to gently make my disagreement with Karen known to her. I owed that honesty to her. To push my viewpoint too hard would have driven her back ever more firmly to her totally unsupported belief (this happened several times). Therefore, whenever Karen raised the topic of Joe, I gently yet firmly told her that I disagreed with her and I took some heat for my honesty. As a friend, it was my duty to let Karen know that her beliefs about Joe made no sense in light of the evidence. For several years, she intensely craved for me to agree with her or at least remain silent when she spoke of Joe’s continuing love for her. It annoyed her immensely whenever I refused to tell her the comforting things she wanted to hear. It was my job, though, to help Karen identify her poor mental hygiene regarding Joe, even though her belief system caused her pain to bear that thought. Here’s why I had to speak up: as long as Karen made claims that Joe (long-gone Joe) still loved her, Karen was not fully able to be my friend, because I couldn’t fully trust her judgment. Karen’s beliefs regarding Joe’s continuing and undying love for her eventually faded, but it took years. Eventually, she stopped discussing Joe, I was once again able to fully trust Karen’s judgment. I hope that the parallels to religious belief are obvious. Moderate believers need to hear from freethinkers for the same reason that freethinkers need to hear from each other. Moderate religious believers need freethinkers to remind them to question outlandish propositions that they have been trained to say (through a lifetime of mostly thoughtless repetition) for the purpose of assuring each other and comforting themselves. Moderate religious believers need to be reminded that claims of virgin birth and dead people coming alive are as absurd as claims that there are two suns in the sky or that giants live in huge castles on the top of clouds. They need to be reminded that it makes no sense to say that dead humans are sentient, because there is no evidence of this. All suspicious claims deserve real scrutiny. That many Christian religious claims are based on the Bible should cause thinking moderate Christians to scurry to study the origin of the Epistles and Gospels. If they bothered to study what is known about these early Christian writings, they would be shocked. But the great majority of Christians, including most moderate Christians, don’t want to know about the gaps, errors and self-contradictions in the writings on which they base most of their religious beliefs. With very few exceptions, moderate (and fundamentalist) Christians consciously refuse to consider the extremely shaky basis of their extraordinary religious claims, yet they continue to proclaim their articles of faith as though they were supported by as much evidence the assertion that there is only one sun. Something is obviously wrong with this type of thought process. People who give a damn about their friends don’t sit in silence when their friends engage in such talk.

Wow, I’ve been working on a post like this myself, and this guy pulled it off beautifully. Thank you, Erich Vieth for saying what needed to be said. I will reference this piece for a long time, and will try and supplement it with my own thoughts sometime soon.:

[ Link: How To Deal With Religious Moderates ]