A Manual for Creating Atheists Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the Prison of Belief (Wright, 2013)
    Videos
    Peter Boghossian,“Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and Other Delusions: Just Say No!” http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2012/02/14/Jesusthe-Easter-Bunny-and-Other-Delusions-Just-Say-No.aspx
    Peter Boghossian, “Faith: Pretending to Know Things You Don’t Know,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4WUFXvCFQ
    Jerry Coyne, “Why Science and Faith Are Incompatible: My Talk in Edinburgh,” http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/why-science-and-faith-are-incompatible-my-talk-in-edinburgh/
    QualiaSoup’s YouTube channel, “UK Secular Humanist Discussing: Science & the Natural World, Critical Thinking, Atheism, Philosophy, Religion,” http://www.youtube.com/user/QualiaSoup
    The Atheist Experience, “The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas geared at a non-atheist audience. Every week we field live calls from atheists and believers alike, and you never know what you’re going to get!” http://www.atheistexperience.com
    Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel, “The true beauty of a self-inquiring sentient universe is lost on those who elect to walk the intellectually vacuous path of comfortable paranoid fantasies,” http://www.youtube.com/user/Thunderf00t
    NOTES
     
The Book of Alma is one of the books in the Book of Mormon. The complete title is “The Book of Alma: The Son of Alma.”
Religious belief is very often defended through the use of clever semantics. There are some important things to note about these dodges. When a person of faith is questioned over one or more specific, illogical tenets of their belief, they often respond with, “Well, of course I don’t believe that,” leaving the Street Epistemologist at a disadvantage since the believer continues to profess their unaltered faith-based belief regardless. If pressed further, the believer will either respond with deepities or with a somewhat different version of “why” they continue to believe despite a lack of evidence. This entrenched position results in a cycle of indefinite repetition. My sense is that those who use meaningless words to protect their emotional ties to faith are engaging in self-deception. (This type of “conversation” is not twosided; it is a monologue masquerading as a dialogue.)
The emotional satisfaction of religious belief vitally depends upon the beliefs being taken literally; the epistemic defense of such beliefs crucially depends on taking them nonliterally. This type of cognitive disruption does not bode well in the search for truth.
What nearly all sophisticated believers do is simultaneously deceive themselves while alternating between two stances: they absolutely don’t believe in that —of course he didn’t walk on water—while voicing unflappable conviction about this —the world was created by a higher power. When defending epistemically, they characterize the belief as not literally requiring the existence of a Special Person (“God loves us” means “Love is important,” “Love prevails in the end,” etc.), but then as soon as they have satisfied the epistemic challenge, they reframe the belief more literally (“God loves us” means “There is a Special Person who loves us”).
I think this latter issue is far more important to address than critics of faith realize, and it is probably a more common phenomenon (not limited to intellectuals) than one might think. It is at least a part of what the believer is doing when replying to criticism by simply and mysteriously saying, “You just don’t understand.” The other part is, “You lack detailed familiarity with the culture, history, and theology of my religion.”
This is a separate issue, and is often enough true, though the response to that is like replying to someone who points out Star Trek is fiction by saying, “You wouldn’t say that if you had the detailed and rich experience of being a Trekkie that I have,” which is, of course, absurd.
Hebrews 11