I’ve met both sorts, people turned off by “The God Delusion” who really would have benefited from something like “Greatest Show on Earth”, and people who really seemed to come around because of it (both irl and in a wide range of fora). The unfortunate side-effect of successful conversion, in my experience, has been that people who are successfully converted by rhetoric frequently begin to spam similar rhetoric, ineptly, resulting mostly in increased polarization among their friends and family.
It seems pretty hard to control for enough factors to see what kind of impact popular atheist intellectuals actually have on de-conversion rates and belief polarization (much less with specific subset of abrasive works), and I can’t find any clear numbers on it. Seems like opinion mining facebook could potentially be useful here.
Amongst the sophisticated theists I know (Church of England types who have often actually read large chunks of the Bible and don’t dispute that something called “evolution” happened), they will detail their objections to The God Delusion at length … without, it turns out, having actually read it. This appears to be the religious meme defending itself. I point them at the bootleg PDF and suggest they actually read it, then complain … at which point they usually never mention it ever again.
This is part of why I tend to think that for the most part, these works aren’t (or if they are, they shouldn’t be) aimed at de-converting the faithful (who have already built up a strong meme-plex to fall back on), but rather for interception and prevention for young potential converts and people who are on the fence. Particularly college kids who have left home and are questioning their belief structure.
The side effect is that something that is marketed well towards this group (imo, this is the case with “The God Delusion”) comes across as shocking and abrasive to the older converts (and this also plays into its marketability to a younger audience). So there’s definitely a trade-off, but getting the numbers right to determine the actual payoff is difficult.
I think a more effective way to increase secular influence is through lobbying. I think in the U.S. there is a great need for a well-funded secular lobby to keep things in check. I found one such lobby but I haven’t had the chance to look into it yet.
I think in practice, it has to be a movement and it has to, in its various parts, work all the angles at once. Which is pretty much the present state of things—there’s plenty of work to go around.
I’ve met both sorts, people turned off by “The God Delusion” who really would have benefited from something like “Greatest Show on Earth”, and people who really seemed to come around because of it (both irl and in a wide range of fora). The unfortunate side-effect of successful conversion, in my experience, has been that people who are successfully converted by rhetoric frequently begin to spam similar rhetoric, ineptly, resulting mostly in increased polarization among their friends and family.
It seems pretty hard to control for enough factors to see what kind of impact popular atheist intellectuals actually have on de-conversion rates and belief polarization (much less with specific subset of abrasive works), and I can’t find any clear numbers on it. Seems like opinion mining facebook could potentially be useful here.
Amongst the sophisticated theists I know (Church of England types who have often actually read large chunks of the Bible and don’t dispute that something called “evolution” happened), they will detail their objections to The God Delusion at length … without, it turns out, having actually read it. This appears to be the religious meme defending itself. I point them at the bootleg PDF and suggest they actually read it, then complain … at which point they usually never mention it ever again.
This is part of why I tend to think that for the most part, these works aren’t (or if they are, they shouldn’t be) aimed at de-converting the faithful (who have already built up a strong meme-plex to fall back on), but rather for interception and prevention for young potential converts and people who are on the fence. Particularly college kids who have left home and are questioning their belief structure.
The side effect is that something that is marketed well towards this group (imo, this is the case with “The God Delusion”) comes across as shocking and abrasive to the older converts (and this also plays into its marketability to a younger audience). So there’s definitely a trade-off, but getting the numbers right to determine the actual payoff is difficult.
I think a more effective way to increase secular influence is through lobbying. I think in the U.S. there is a great need for a well-funded secular lobby to keep things in check. I found one such lobby but I haven’t had the chance to look into it yet.
I think in practice, it has to be a movement and it has to, in its various parts, work all the angles at once. Which is pretty much the present state of things—there’s plenty of work to go around.