Top 10 Tips For Reaching Out To Atheists

[cleanhippie]

Last week I lambasted Rabbi Adam Jacobs who wrote an “open letter to the atheist community”. As someone else has astutely observed, the rabbi’s letter was practically a model for how not to address serious atheists. In hopes for better future discussions between believers and non-believers, I decided to give some advice to believers who would like to reach out to us in the future, whether publicly or personally. In some cases I will use examples that assume the reader is a Christian since I live in America and in America seemingly 99.99% of would-be proselytizers are Christians of some sort. But most of the principles will be valuable to Muslims and those rare proselytizing Jews too.

I completely understand if you do not want this advice or refuse to abide by it. I am fine with you not even trying to reach out to me. But if you would really like to try to reach out to atheists for some reason, I think I can speak for a lot of atheists when I offer these tips for how to make us like you and not be as insulted and unimpressed as many of us were by the Rabbi Jacobs’s letter.

(Note from cleanhippie: there are several paragraphs for each of these "tips". I urge you to read the article)


1. Do not “share the Gospel” with us.

2. Do not lie.

3. Do not assume you are either morally better, spiritually more attuned, or happier than we are simply because you belong to your faith.

4. If you decide to debate us about God and employ a strategy to convince us, stick with the topic you raise and address our counter-arguments without constantly changing the subject.

5. Do not try to offer us reasons to change our minds while refusing to open your own mind.

6. Do not try to tell us what we really must think about ethics or metaphysics or assume you know what any given atheist thinks about these issues.

7. Do not scold us for abandoning the faith.

8. Explicitly embrace political secularism.

9. Do not change your evidence criteria in self-serving ways.

10. Turn the other cheek by being a good sport about criticism and jokes about your religion (even unfair forms).

http://freethoughtblogs.com/camelswithhammers/2011/02/22/top-10-tips-for-reaching-out-to-atheists/

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The author has recently started a Top 10 Tips For Reaching Out To Religious Believers here ===> http://freethoughtblogs.com/camelswithhammers/2011/10/05/dont-call-religious-believers-stupid-tip-1-of-10-for-reaching-out-to-religious-believers/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

[GodlessBiker]

1. You need an 11th Tip For Reaching Out To Atheists: Do not reach out to us. We will reach out to ...

you if need be.

[Auggie]

3. That should be the first tip and the only one,

in my opinion.

[ixion]

5. exactly.

[Scuba]

2. I like the penis analogy myself. n/t

[Speck Tater]

4. Do not expect us to share your assumption that the Bible is "the word of God", AND...

Do not pick and choose which parts of the Bible to use and which parts to ignore.

[darkstar3]

6. See #3

1. Thou shalt always be honest and faithful, especially to the provider of thy nookie.
2. Thou shalt try really hard not to screw anyone over, unless of course they screw you first.
3. Thou shalt KEEP THY RELIGION TO THYSELF.

May Carlin's wisdom far outlive his body.

[struggle4progress]

7. I somehow doubt Rabbi Jacobs was trying to “share the Gospel,” but I suppose

my doubt could be dismissed as "courtier's reply," insofar as it might involve some familiarity with certain theological differences, that not everyone finds interesting

[Nihil]

8. Judging from what I've seen ...

... the first step appears to be "Charge up your cattle prod" ...
:shrug:

[Prophet 451]

9. Can I offer a few for the athiests?

Being of a minority faith (Luciferian Satanist), I tend to get it from both sides so, while I agree with the above, I'd like to offer a few suggestions for the athiests too.

1) Don't assume that since we're religious, it's always OK to debate religion with us. Just like you, sometimes we just want to watch the game.

2) Make it clear whether you're talking about "soft" or "hard" athieism. The former is a personal belief, the latter is a belief about the universe (or lack thereof on both counts, you know what I mean).

3) Do not assume we are stupid and/or mentally ill for believing. Most of us are just as intelligent and sane as most of you.

4) Ask a few questions about what your disputant actually believes before debating it. Faith is very much a personal journey and what one person believes isn't always a good indicator of what even people of the same faith believes. Biblical literalists are a pretty small minority so we get tired of it being assumed that we agree with them.

5) Always assume good will. Most of us, just like most of you, are decent people just trying to live our lives as best we can. Most of us find the Pat Robertson's and Fred Phelps's just as objectionable as you do (and most mainstream Christians outright detest them for obvious reasons).

[cleanhippie]

11. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Allow me to retort.

1. We don't. Most atheists do not initiate religious conversations, the conversations usually start AFTER a religious person has made a statement or claim that does not sit well with reality.

2. I can only speak for myself on this, but that distinction is nonsense. I do not believe in deities. Is that hard or soft? I don't know and don't care. Its not what I believe, but what I DON"t believe. If you make a claim about whatever god you choose to believe in, and cannot support that claim with evidence, or make irrational statement regarding your god, expect to be refuted.

3. Again, speaking for myself, I do not assume that you are stupid or mentally ill, but when one makes irrational statements or claims, and then is shown that sad statement or claim cannot possibly be true, continuing to make the statement or claim leads me to believe that you are either stupid, mentally ill, or willfully ignorant. How is that not a logical progression?
Let's use the Santa analogy. If I assert that Santa really does exist, and delivers toys to all the children in the world in just one night, and you point out the hundreds of reason that none of that can possibly be true, yet I CONTINUE to cling to my belief even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, what do you think of me? Stupid, mentally ill, or willfully ignorant are labels that seem to fit, no?

4. That is a great suggestion. And I do try do do just that. The problem arises when those stated beliefs seem to CHANGE during the course of the argument. They seem to CHANGE to fit whatever narrative the believer is trying to convey. A common tactic is called "moving the goalposts". If believers stayed even mildly consistent with their beliefs, things would go much smoother, but then that runs us right back to #3.

5. Good will, like trust, must be earned. I do try to start off that way, but for the most part, believers who care enough to initiate a conversation on religion usually DO have an ulterior motive. The ones that don't seem to be the ones that think religion is a private matter. I would like to keep my non-belief a private matter, but believers the world over, and Christians here in the USA are PUSHING a religious agenda onto the rest of us and it deserves a response.

In my OP, I provided a link to where the author is starting a list of 10 ways for atheists to reach out to believers. Maybe some of your ideas will be there on that list.

:fistbump:

[Prophet 451]

12. Hmmm

To respond to your points:

1) You might not but you'd be surprised at the many who do. In fairness, the ones who do often seem to be whatever the athiest equivelent of teenagers at their first tent revival is, that kind of I've-found-the-truth-and-must-share-it mentality.

2) The distinction is one that I've seen used many times (although the names differ). "Soft" athieism is a simple lack of belief. It's saying something about the self, "I don't believe in god(s)". "Hard" athieism makes a statement about the universe, "there is no god". Granted, it's a subtle difference but an important one. And I actually am mentally ill so it would be a safe assumption :)

3) I should think that, if that belief works for you, more power to you. This is somewhat tied to the distinction between hard and soft athieism above. One can no more prove that god(s) doesn't/don't exist than one can prove the non-existence of Santa (since absence of proof does not equate to proof of absence). One can show that such existence is extremely unlikely in numerous ways, of course, and if you personally find that extreme unliklihood convincing, good for you. Personally, I don't. That doesn't mean that either of us are better or worse people than the other, just different.

4) I appreciate what you're saying there. Having worked at Beliefnet.com for years (until Fox brought the site and got rid of most of us), I've noticed that a lot of believers don't seem to have thought their beliefs through very much. On a personal level, that baffles me. When one is committing, at the least, one's faith, time and effort, I would have thought thinking the thing through was the least one could do. But then...

5) My sympathies for the fundies trying to ru(i)n your country. Here (Britain), thankfully, religion doesn't really play a role in national or local politics. Despite (or perhaps because) we technically have a state religion (and yes, I would like to see that link gone and soon), religion as part of the public sphere pretty much died here after WWI. You still get the occasional nutter but not enough of them to really affect policy.

[cleanhippie]

13. Thank you for the rational conversation.

I think that more or less, we are on the same page here. Thanks for your reasoned and rational responses. I hope we see more of you in future discussions here.

[rug]

10. He's a cliche, writing cliches.

"Until he was 21 he was a devout Evangelical Christian. As an undergraduate, he studied philosophy and minored in religion at Grove City College, which is one of America's most religiously and politically right wing colleges."