That seems to assume that direct argument is the only way to persuade someone of something. It’s in fact a conspicuously poor way of doing so in cases of strong conviction, as Yvain’s post goes to some trouble to explain, but that doesn’t imply we’re obliged to permanently accept any premises that people have integrated into their identities.
You can’t directly force a crisis of faith; trying tends to further root people in their convictions. But you can build a lot of the groundwork for one by reducing inferential distance, and you can help normalize dissenting opinions to reduce the social cost of abandoning false beliefs. It’s not at all clear to me that this would be a less effective approach than trying to bowdlerize major religions into something less epistemically destructive, and it’s certainly a more honest one—instrumentally important in itself given how well-honed our instincts for political dissembling are—for people that already lack religious conviction.
Your mileage may vary if you’re a strong Deist or something, but most of the people here aren’t.
That seems to assume that direct argument is the only way to persuade someone of something. It’s in fact a conspicuously poor way of doing so in cases of strong conviction, as Yvain’s post goes to some trouble to explain, but that doesn’t imply we’re obliged to permanently accept any premises that people have integrated into their identities.
You can’t directly force a crisis of faith; trying tends to further root people in their convictions. But you can build a lot of the groundwork for one by reducing inferential distance, and you can help normalize dissenting opinions to reduce the social cost of abandoning false beliefs. It’s not at all clear to me that this would be a less effective approach than trying to bowdlerize major religions into something less epistemically destructive, and it’s certainly a more honest one—instrumentally important in itself given how well-honed our instincts for political dissembling are—for people that already lack religious conviction.
Your mileage may vary if you’re a strong Deist or something, but most of the people here aren’t.