A Manual for Creating Atheists Read Online Free PDF

are likely false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way .
    THE DANGER OF FAITH
“No amount of belief makes something a fact.”
— James Randi
    The pretending-to-know-things-you-don’t-know pandemic hurts us all. Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities. Those who believe on the basis of insufficient evidence create external conditions based upon what they think is in their best interest, but this is actually counterproductive. In the United States, for example, public policies driven by people who pretend to know things they don’t know continue to hurt people: abstinence-only sex education, prohibitions against gay marriage, bans on death with dignity, corporal punishment in schools, failure to fund international family planning organizations, and promoting the teaching of Creationism and other pseudosciences are but a few of the many misguided conclusions wrought by irrationality.
    The less one relies on reason and evidence to form conclusions, the more arbitrary the conclusion. In aggregate, conclusions that result from a lack of evidence can have incredibly dangerous consequences. The Taliban, for example, have rooted their vision of a good life on the Koran. By acting on what they perceive to be divine injunctions revealed to God’s Prophet, they think they’re creating a good life and a good society. They are not. 14 15 Consequently, the conclusions they act upon—covering women and beating them, beheading people who have rival interpretations of the Koran or who act in ways they deem un-Islamic, perpetrating violence against females who seek an education, denying citizens basic freedoms, executing people for blasphemy—take them away from a good life. They’ve misidentified the process that will allow their community to flourish because they’ve identified and used faith, not evidence and reason, as a guide.
    How do we know the society the Taliban created has not led to human flourishing? By virtually every modern metric: exports versus imports, literacy, economic aid, public health, life expectancy, infant mortality, household income, GDP, Happy Planet Index, etc. Afghanistan under the Taliban was an unmitigated catastrophe. It is not in anyone’s interest, particularly the people who live under their tyranny, to have created a dystopian, premodern, misogynistic theocracy. 16 (If you don’t think they created a dystopia, or if you’re a relativist and think they created a society that’s merely different, not better or worse, from Denmark, for example, then there’s nothing I can say to you. Nothing I write in this book will persuade you.)
    The vast majority of people use faith to understand the world, to guide their actions, and to ground their institutions. Nation-states like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran adhere to Islamic law (sharia) as the basis for state law. This is a problem that would be unimaginable in its scope and severity were it not for the fact that we’re currently witnesses to this epistemic horror show, such as the beheading of homosexuals, blasphemers, adulterers, and apostates and radically disproportionate treatment of individuals based upon their gender.
    Yet there is hope. Faith is slowly falling into disrepute. The forces of unreason are diminishing in number. Thousands of new Horsemen, Street Epistemologists, are emerging.
    DIG DEEPER
    Books
    Sam Harris, The End of Faith (Harris, 2004)
    Stephen Law, Believing Bullshit (Law, 2011)
    John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith (Loftus, 2013)
    Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (Shermer, 2011)
    Al Stefanelli, A Voice Of Reason in an Unreasonable World: The Rise of Atheism On Planet Earth (Stefanelli, 2011)
    Victor Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (Stenger, 2012)
    Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood,