I want to give my 13 year old cousin a book on atheism for teenagers. Her mom has been raising her Catholic and had also sent her to a locally well-regarded Jewish preschool, saying things about “heritage” and such. (Her father is a non-believer but apparently hasn’t objected to this religious upbringing.)
My parents say that doing so is a bad idea because it will offend my aunt. I feel strongly about my atheism and want to do something in this vein. Any advice?
I’d suggest not giving her a book overtly about atheism. Something more broadly about skepticism would be a better choice I think. The Demon-Haunted World gets a lot of recommendations, though I haven’t actually read it myself.
In non-fiction, The Philosophy Gym might be suitable. I’ve read the first three chapters and they seemed fairly clear-thinking. (I was reading with an eye to writing a review; it’s been a month or so since I picked it up, but there was no particular reason I stopped.)
I feel strongly about my atheism and want to do something in this vein. Any advice?
Get over it. Overt evangelism really isn’t worth the hassle if you aren’t doing it for the expectation of divine reward. If you want to have influence try to be the coolest seeming older cousin possible and hope your influence rubs off somewhat.
It’s “Someone is wrong on the internet” syndrome, only much worse because it’s “Someone I know is wrong right next to me”, which makes it much stronger.
Have you thought about giving her something with strong rationalist themes instead? HPMoR is what I’m thinking of specifically, but other stuff could work.
If she doesn’t learn how to think rationally, an atheist book may or may not work regardless. If she does know how to think rationally, it’s a matter of time before she sees the inconsistencies in religion anyhow. Plus, fiction is a much more compelling read than argument books and you get to keep plausible deniability without offending her aunt.
If she does know how to think rationally, it’s a matter of time before she sees the inconsistencies in religion anyhow.
Note that this presumes her to be approaching religion from a fact-based perspective: e.g. treating it as just a set of empirical beliefs. This is true for some people, but not for all. There are many people who approach religion from an emotion-based perspective, where they start from the emotion of faith which never goes away, even if they intellectually acknowledge that they have no real justification for it. And then there are people who are somewhere in between: they have an emotion of faith, but one which can be affected by factual knowledge.
It seems to me like a common failing of many atheists, including many LW posters, is that they’ve never experienced that emotion and therefore presume that all religious people treat their faith as merely a set of beliefs—which seems to me like an utter misunderstanding of the actual psychology of religion. It also disposes them to consider all religious people “stupid” for not seeing what they consider obvious, failing to consider the fact that religious people might see those things but in some cases elect to ignore them. Even if atheists do manage to see this, they call it “belief-in-belief” and say it’s not actually real belief at all—which is still missing the point.
Is religious faith an emotion? That’s not me being a smug empiricist, I’m actually curious. I’ve talked to enough theists and read enough apologia to understand that a lot of folks have a strong sense of the numinous that doesn’t really go away, but I know very little about its actual phenomenology.
Here’s what one person (Janos Honkonen) commented in that discussion, which I thought was a pretty awesome description:
Okay, hmm. Imagine a situation where you started seeing a new color. It would be damn difficult to describe how it looks and why the heck you feel that seeing that color made things shine just a bit brighter and more beautiful, and somehow that gave you certain kind of serenity that somehow makes you be a bit less if a dick you’d probably be without it, maybe. Some other people would see that color and make a huge amount of noise and nuisance about it, and others would say that people seeing that color are deluded, idiots or psychotic. You’d sit in the middle wishing everybody would just shut the fuck up, especially those people who forget that the main “use” of the color is to see it and see a different world and you, not to make noise about it existing and harass other people about it.
This is more or less how it works in my head, and it’s not like I can fucking help it. Instead of dimming it, learning about biology, the cosmos, neurology and psychology makes that color just burn brighter and more beautiful.
Also, Googling a bit I found this summary of Jonathan Haidt’s research to the experiences of sacredness. Reading that and Janos’ description together made me a little more convinced that actually, just about everyone has experienced something akin to religious belief—it’s just that (some varieties of) religious people experience something similar far more often.
ETA: Janos pointed out that the experience of awe in nature and the experience of the divine feel different, and I should clarify that I didn’t think that the experience of nature and the experience of the sacred would be exactly the same, just… somewhere in the same rough neighborhood of experience-space, analogous to the way that listening to a good song is quite different from reading a good book, but still closer to reading a good book than getting punched in the face.
I found it hopelessly nihilistic and self-defeating as a moralistic tale; the big moral struggle is against Original Sin, but it is framed in the end in some New Sin instead.
It only made sense to me as a story about one monolithic Authority being replaced by another, which institutes rules to try to prevent themselves from being supplanted by the same means in the future.
The big moral struggle is against GOD. In the end, they kill god, and then save the universe by having sex, ie by denying puritanical prudishness. Then society goes on to live happily after without god’s pernicious influence, instead of everyone living happily in heaven.
Except that it turns out they weren’t fighting god, they were fighting an apparent angel who other angels claimed was god, fighting on the side of angels who were mostly interested in making more angels. And the protagonists didn’t go on to live happily, it’s implied that they were kind of depressed for the rest of their lives. If it’s Narnia, it’s William Blake’s Narnia, not an atheist’s.
Blake’s influence is pretty clear (right down to the sex thing), and the whole thing could be interpreted as a Jesus allegory, within the framework of William Blake’s belief that Satan, not God, was in the right, but fought the war immorally. Jesus, in Blake’s works, was a divine entity who chose to oppose God morally, and so won. (Asriel and Coulter would be Satan; Lyra and Will, Jesus, who is notably absent from the story’s religions.)
I had much the same opinion, atheism vs theism debate raise red flags. People go talking about improbable events, morality, friends and parents in the emotional mode.
Teach how to think and some heuristics, not perfectly baked beliefs.
You don’t mention what your young cousin believes. That’s pretty important; if she believes what her parents do, you may offend and alienate her if you’re not careful.
I don’t really know, but I suspect that she believes in God with the same sincerity that an 8-year-old believes in Santa Claus… and that she also doesn’t know that she has atheist relatives.
I want to give my 13 year old cousin a book on atheism for teenagers. Her mom has been raising her Catholic and had also sent her to a locally well-regarded Jewish preschool, saying things about “heritage” and such. (Her father is a non-believer but apparently hasn’t objected to this religious upbringing.)
My parents say that doing so is a bad idea because it will offend my aunt. I feel strongly about my atheism and want to do something in this vein. Any advice?
I’d suggest not giving her a book overtly about atheism. Something more broadly about skepticism would be a better choice I think. The Demon-Haunted World gets a lot of recommendations, though I haven’t actually read it myself.
In non-fiction, The Philosophy Gym might be suitable. I’ve read the first three chapters and they seemed fairly clear-thinking. (I was reading with an eye to writing a review; it’s been a month or so since I picked it up, but there was no particular reason I stopped.)
Get over it. Overt evangelism really isn’t worth the hassle if you aren’t doing it for the expectation of divine reward. If you want to have influence try to be the coolest seeming older cousin possible and hope your influence rubs off somewhat.
It’s “Someone is wrong on the internet” syndrome, only much worse because it’s “Someone I know is wrong right next to me”, which makes it much stronger.
ETA: Also, it’s just that atheism seems so obvious to me that anyone with a shred of sense should easily be able to see that Christianity is false, just by praying and seeing what happens. I know intellectually that religious people aren’t actually idiots or insane people, but I feel like they are.
Have you thought about giving her something with strong rationalist themes instead? HPMoR is what I’m thinking of specifically, but other stuff could work.
If she doesn’t learn how to think rationally, an atheist book may or may not work regardless. If she does know how to think rationally, it’s a matter of time before she sees the inconsistencies in religion anyhow. Plus, fiction is a much more compelling read than argument books and you get to keep plausible deniability without offending her aunt.
Note that this presumes her to be approaching religion from a fact-based perspective: e.g. treating it as just a set of empirical beliefs. This is true for some people, but not for all. There are many people who approach religion from an emotion-based perspective, where they start from the emotion of faith which never goes away, even if they intellectually acknowledge that they have no real justification for it. And then there are people who are somewhere in between: they have an emotion of faith, but one which can be affected by factual knowledge.
It seems to me like a common failing of many atheists, including many LW posters, is that they’ve never experienced that emotion and therefore presume that all religious people treat their faith as merely a set of beliefs—which seems to me like an utter misunderstanding of the actual psychology of religion. It also disposes them to consider all religious people “stupid” for not seeing what they consider obvious, failing to consider the fact that religious people might see those things but in some cases elect to ignore them. Even if atheists do manage to see this, they call it “belief-in-belief” and say it’s not actually real belief at all—which is still missing the point.
Is religious faith an emotion? That’s not me being a smug empiricist, I’m actually curious. I’ve talked to enough theists and read enough apologia to understand that a lot of folks have a strong sense of the numinous that doesn’t really go away, but I know very little about its actual phenomenology.
Here’s what one person (Janos Honkonen) commented in that discussion, which I thought was a pretty awesome description:
Also, Googling a bit I found this summary of Jonathan Haidt’s research to the experiences of sacredness. Reading that and Janos’ description together made me a little more convinced that actually, just about everyone has experienced something akin to religious belief—it’s just that (some varieties of) religious people experience something similar far more often.
ETA: Janos pointed out that the experience of awe in nature and the experience of the divine feel different, and I should clarify that I didn’t think that the experience of nature and the experience of the sacred would be exactly the same, just… somewhere in the same rough neighborhood of experience-space, analogous to the way that listening to a good song is quite different from reading a good book, but still closer to reading a good book than getting punched in the face.
“Emotion” probably isn’t the best word. I cross-posted this comment on my Facebook account, where one person commented that
I’m not sure I agree with that entirely either, but it seems to be more in the right direction than just calling it an emotion is.
Maybe I should just go with the His Dark Materials trilogy first...
It’s basically atheist narnia, so that makes sense.
...it is?
I found it hopelessly nihilistic and self-defeating as a moralistic tale; the big moral struggle is against Original Sin, but it is framed in the end in some New Sin instead.
It only made sense to me as a story about one monolithic Authority being replaced by another, which institutes rules to try to prevent themselves from being supplanted by the same means in the future.
The big moral struggle is against GOD. In the end, they kill god, and then save the universe by having sex, ie by denying puritanical prudishness. Then society goes on to live happily after without god’s pernicious influence, instead of everyone living happily in heaven.
Except that it turns out they weren’t fighting god, they were fighting an apparent angel who other angels claimed was god, fighting on the side of angels who were mostly interested in making more angels. And the protagonists didn’t go on to live happily, it’s implied that they were kind of depressed for the rest of their lives. If it’s Narnia, it’s William Blake’s Narnia, not an atheist’s.
Blake’s influence is pretty clear (right down to the sex thing), and the whole thing could be interpreted as a Jesus allegory, within the framework of William Blake’s belief that Satan, not God, was in the right, but fought the war immorally. Jesus, in Blake’s works, was a divine entity who chose to oppose God morally, and so won. (Asriel and Coulter would be Satan; Lyra and Will, Jesus, who is notably absent from the story’s religions.)
I had much the same opinion, atheism vs theism debate raise red flags. People go talking about improbable events, morality, friends and parents in the emotional mode.
Teach how to think and some heuristics, not perfectly baked beliefs.
You don’t mention what your young cousin believes. That’s pretty important; if she believes what her parents do, you may offend and alienate her if you’re not careful.
I don’t really know, but I suspect that she believes in God with the same sincerity that an 8-year-old believes in Santa Claus… and that she also doesn’t know that she has atheist relatives.