Teach Them

[themyst]

Hi

I am busy trying to put together a short article/comment on my thoughts. I wonder if you would read below and give me your thoughts, Am I making my points clear etc, are their valid arguments and so on.




I often listen to believers and I wonder, can they/do they really believe that crap. I hear people talking about gods or goddesses or their latest spiritual experience and I think, come on guys, no one really believes that, how could you.

And then I listen to others talking about their understanding of “science” and I have to query, how can anyone believe that.

It is all so wrong, just apply the scientific method to any of it, it is so simple.

Then I stop and think about my life, my schooling and my path to becoming a skeptic and realize, you know what, they have no choice but to believe that stuff for they have neither the knowledge nor equipment to believe anything else.

I once used to be a Christian, then after a time I came to realize that it was just not the belief for me. I just could not believe that kind of god. So I chose another, then another, going from Buddhism, to Wicca, to druidic beliefs, each lacking for me.

I then tried chaos magic, the believer’s skepticism. Chaos magic is the idea that, nothing is true and that nothing is the same as everything, and that because no gods exist, all gods exist.
It is not up to the gods to guide you but you to guide them, i.e. you are responsible for your own actions based on your own conscience, not on what sort of punishment you will get for being naughty, be it hell or the rule of three.

Well anyway, it was a short step from believing that nothing is everything to believing in nothing and being skeptical of everything.

What I am trying to explain badly is that I became a skeptic not through my knowledge of science but my paths through different beliefs. It was only after I became a skeptic and started learning more did I discover the scientific method. It was never taught in schools and as far as I know, it still isn’t.

I cannot blame people for their beliefs for that is all they know. I am coming to the idea that it is not the showing to them of how wrong their belief is, nor the attempting to prove "the negative" of their belief that will show them the truth.

No, I suspect the only solution to helping people step out of their belief is by teaching them, not science, but the scientific method so that they may themselves investigate their own world.

[dann]

1) Don't use the word "crap". You don't need it, and there is no point in offending people if you can get the message across without doing so.

2) I tended to think like you until I discovered that a lot of (most of the time) very smart people are religious. Many of the guys on this list of Danish skeptics (http://www.skeptica.dk/dkskepsis/presselisten.htm), for instance, are Xians. I won't tell you which ones and it does not really matter. In our context they argue scientifically - against Creationism, against healing prayers etc - and they know all about the "scientific method". So why care if, occasionally, in other contexts, they feel the need to 'relieve their spiritual nature' (as one of the guys in my sig line once said in German, here in my translation)?

3) My solution (see my sig line again) would be to try to remove as many of the material obstacles to critical thinking as possible, i.e. if people don't have access to affordable, science-based medicine and doctors, it is no use telling them that quacks and witch doctors suck:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=70329
If, on the other hand, they have both the doctors and more than enough money to pay them, feel free to call them any name in the book if they go see a quack. Unless, of course, they are terminally ill. In that case I would attack the quacks and not the one desperately seeking their help.

[themyst]

Thank you for your advice and ideas.

When I spoke of not being taught the tools, I was thinking of the teaching that I know of in South Africa.

That is something I never understood, the intellegent, trained, following some quack idea or other. Is it just that people don't always apply the same std to all parts of their life?

[dann]

"std"??? I am not sure what you are talking about. I hope that it's not this kind of STD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STD). :)

But very few people, maybe nobody, apply considered (or even common) sense to every sphere of life. Even skeptics have to relax and let themselves go sometimes.

The problem, however, at least as I see it, is that people sometimes may feel the need to find meaning in meaninglessness. If your life (or just an element or two of it) stinks, you try to fix it, but what happens if you can neither fix it nor come to terms with this life? Let's say that you have a McJob, no prospects of ever getting anything better. In our kind of society, the competitive market economies, you may even start blaming yourself: 'everyone is supposed to be the architect of his own fortune', right? So now you not only have to live with the fact that your life stinks, you also have to live with the 'fact' that you are a miserable 'architect'!

Some people find other spheres of life where they can 'prove' that there are even bigger losers than them: An ordinary thug may beat up other people to prove that they are the losers and that he is therefore a kind of winner.

Or ... you can try to make sense of the world by looking for meaning beyond reality. For instance, your life may suck, but it sucks for a reason: Life is a test, and it is so much easier for you to prove yourself if you are poor than if you are rich:
"...I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
So consider yourself lucky that your life sucks! You'll get pie in the sky when you die!

Or what do you do when you lose a loved one that you feel that you cannot live without? You cannot live with the idea that you will never see that special someone again, or that this special someone will never again see or experience anything at all?! (And in the end this special someone is you!)

Well, you cannot change the fact that your loved one is dead (or that you are going to die eventually), but you can change the idea that he/she is!

There is a solution to the first dilemma: revolution. Do away with the kind of society that forces a lot of people to live in poverty. It is the solution that I would suggest to anyone instead of religion: Sky pie is too humble for me!

In the second instance I might tell people to accept the grief, go through the process of mourning, which may take a couple of months or even years. That would be my way. But I cannot say that it is much better than the religious 'alternative', as long as religion is restricted to this.

In other words, I would never recommend acquiescence to the kind of fate that you can actually do something about, which is why I oppose religion, but I don't have a big problem with people who embrace religion as a way of overcoming a deep personal grief as long as they don't begin to embrace the weeping madonna statues and Sylvia Brownes because they also need proof of the (non-existent, of course) afterlife.
The tricky part, however, is that when you decide to relax your common sense, it is hard to know when or where to stop, of course, which is the reason why I would never recommend religion to anyone.
But I also would not spend too much time trying to talk believers out of their beliefs. They have made the decision to believe in spite of common (and any other) sense, which is the reason why they also cannot be talked out of it again with sensible arguments. (And what else do we have to offer?)

Sometimes I find it hard enough to talk sense to irreligious people who have decided to believe in, for instance, the blessings of the market economy. :)

And since you live in South Africa, I'd recommend this article:
http://www.gegenstandpunkt.com/english/poverty.htm
I would not know how to talk a ghetto dweller with no income out of visiting a witch doctor if they don't have a viable alternative. The alternative would be to tell them to give up hope and die sensibly!

[themyst]

std = standard :-)

I agree with what you said. However the point I was hoping to make is that if people make a choice because they can't handle any other truth, that is one thing but the problem that I was looking at was that the people in South Africa are into religion and other stuff because they do not know of anything else. They don't know what the choices are, neither do they ever realize that there is even a choice available.

If our Health Minister believes that eating garlic will cure AIDS what hope is there that the population will even know that such a thing as science exists, let alone that there is such a thing as the scientific method.

[Smiledriver]

Avoid psychologising your opponents. You claim they believe in nonsense and then claim that that's is all they are capable of. Thus you set yourself up to be irrefutable since you have already decided that your opponents are stupid and deluded. Further, your inability to understand how they can believe what they do is irrelevant.

Instead, try asking what reasons they have to believe and show that their best reasons don't stand up to scrutiny.

Also, you should say which schools don't teach the scientific method, everyone I've ever heard of does, except perhaps schools that don't teach science.