I wonder if anybody has advice on how to handle this
I personally would refrain from publicly criticising her thinking, life choices and core identity on the internet. For example:
But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry and how often I thought she was taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah. I remembered how I thought she had a confused conception of meta-ethics and that she often seemed skeptical of reductionism, which in retrospect should have been a major red flag for purported atheists. So yeah, spending all your time arguing about Catholic doctrine really is a warning sign, no matter how strongly you seem to champion the “atheist” side of the debate. Seriously.
… this is insightful and valuable as a warning to others and for your own future reference. But it is more something to do once the victim has already been written off and attempts at influence abandoned.
This is a fair point, and I’m presently debating whether to go back and remove or at least soften this language. For most people, I think you would be right. But I think the situation may be different here because my friend has a long-running atheist blog where she deals with exactly these sorts of criticisms all the time (indeed, I myself have often posted to the effect of “I really think you’re taking this too seriously, being too tolerant, etc.”). She was also part of the same college debating society that I was in, and I know that she enjoys intellectual sparring even on subjects this personal—indeed, she’s welcoming it right now on the very post I linked to above.
So I think it’s unlikely she’d be seriously offended by any of what I’m saying now. Your general point is still a good one, though, so I appreciate the advice. The Internet is a smaller place than we think.
But you guessed right, I don’t mind the comments above at all, but they’d be more conducive to a productive fight if things like “taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah” were hyperlinks.
Ah, well that certainly saves me from having to decide what to do here. I initially wanted to avoid linking to your blog too much in my original post, just because I didn’t want to send people off discussing particular religious issues that weren’t really relevant to what I was talking about. But the specific episode I had in mind when I wrote this was the debate you hosted with Matt—in particular, his assertions that we need to put homosexuals back in the closet to protect same-sex friendships. Likewise, perhaps, with the literal-but-not-physical understanding of transubstantiation.
Relatedly, my apologies for not realizing you were at least a quasi-regular member here. I knew you were familiar with a lot of the core Sequences material, but I didn’t know you read or posted on day-to-day stuff with any regularity. I stand by the substance of what I said, of course, but I probably would have structured it differently if I’d expected you to be interacting in this forum. I certainly didn’t intend to create anything like a “she’s turning, get her!” dynamic.
I read the curated blog, not the discussion forum so much. You got rumbled by google analytics, which showed me a lot of traffic coming from here. I’m actually going to the July rationality minicamp, so if any people in this thread are going to, they can distill the best of this thread for what I assume are forthcoming fights.
Perhaps we should fight over whether one should actually convert? Of all actual institutions and traditions I lean most towards Catholicism but have not converted due to e.g. moral uncertainty about what counts as consent to delusion and what counts as unjustified endorsement of suboptimality. Catholicism has more and subtler truths in it than you can find anywhere else, but...
“Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather, it is telling the difference between right and almost right.”
My gut instinct is to find ways to get her to think about other religions instead. If she’s basing her belief on an emotional feeling and needs an anchor, you might be able to point out that there are other religions which have more general anchors, instead of extremely specific ones. I could see the discussion going along the lines of “which is more likely, a major earthquake happening in california, or a major earthquake happening in california that strikes los angeles?”, eg “which is more likely, the existence of a god, or the existence of a god that also happens to be made in the image of man?”
Regardless, the more general her anchors are, the easier it will be for her to give them up, or convert them into something more correct. I’ve seen people go from “some arbitrary god is out there” to “god is the universe” to “there is no god” pretty easily, but to shed the shackles of “I believe in our lord and saviour jesus christ who died for our sins” is much harder, if only because it’s so much more specific and detailed.
I personally would refrain from publicly criticising her thinking, life choices and core identity on the internet. For example:
… this is insightful and valuable as a warning to others and for your own future reference. But it is more something to do once the victim has already been written off and attempts at influence abandoned.
This is a fair point, and I’m presently debating whether to go back and remove or at least soften this language. For most people, I think you would be right. But I think the situation may be different here because my friend has a long-running atheist blog where she deals with exactly these sorts of criticisms all the time (indeed, I myself have often posted to the effect of “I really think you’re taking this too seriously, being too tolerant, etc.”). She was also part of the same college debating society that I was in, and I know that she enjoys intellectual sparring even on subjects this personal—indeed, she’s welcoming it right now on the very post I linked to above.
So I think it’s unlikely she’d be seriously offended by any of what I’m saying now. Your general point is still a good one, though, so I appreciate the advice. The Internet is a smaller place than we think.
Too late, Jay! I found the thread :)
But you guessed right, I don’t mind the comments above at all, but they’d be more conducive to a productive fight if things like “taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah” were hyperlinks.
Ah, well that certainly saves me from having to decide what to do here. I initially wanted to avoid linking to your blog too much in my original post, just because I didn’t want to send people off discussing particular religious issues that weren’t really relevant to what I was talking about. But the specific episode I had in mind when I wrote this was the debate you hosted with Matt—in particular, his assertions that we need to put homosexuals back in the closet to protect same-sex friendships. Likewise, perhaps, with the literal-but-not-physical understanding of transubstantiation.
Relatedly, my apologies for not realizing you were at least a quasi-regular member here. I knew you were familiar with a lot of the core Sequences material, but I didn’t know you read or posted on day-to-day stuff with any regularity. I stand by the substance of what I said, of course, but I probably would have structured it differently if I’d expected you to be interacting in this forum. I certainly didn’t intend to create anything like a “she’s turning, get her!” dynamic.
I read the curated blog, not the discussion forum so much. You got rumbled by google analytics, which showed me a lot of traffic coming from here. I’m actually going to the July rationality minicamp, so if any people in this thread are going to, they can distill the best of this thread for what I assume are forthcoming fights.
Please, please, please blog this. I would love reading it.
I would like to ask this:
Do you expect any experience (before death, of course) that you would not predict using an atheist point of view?
No fights, just opportunities for us to use each other’s brains to update for greater accuracy!
Perhaps we should fight over whether one should actually convert? Of all actual institutions and traditions I lean most towards Catholicism but have not converted due to e.g. moral uncertainty about what counts as consent to delusion and what counts as unjustified endorsement of suboptimality. Catholicism has more and subtler truths in it than you can find anywhere else, but...
— Charles Spurgeon
My gut instinct is to find ways to get her to think about other religions instead. If she’s basing her belief on an emotional feeling and needs an anchor, you might be able to point out that there are other religions which have more general anchors, instead of extremely specific ones. I could see the discussion going along the lines of “which is more likely, a major earthquake happening in california, or a major earthquake happening in california that strikes los angeles?”, eg “which is more likely, the existence of a god, or the existence of a god that also happens to be made in the image of man?”
Regardless, the more general her anchors are, the easier it will be for her to give them up, or convert them into something more correct. I’ve seen people go from “some arbitrary god is out there” to “god is the universe” to “there is no god” pretty easily, but to shed the shackles of “I believe in our lord and saviour jesus christ who died for our sins” is much harder, if only because it’s so much more specific and detailed.