What are the best methods for encouraging religious de-conversion and immunising people against religious beliefs?

(October 24, 2023 at 3:41 am)FrustratedFool Wrote: What are the best methods for encouraging religious de-conversion and immunising people against religious beliefs?

Bastinado, thumbscrews, and the rack.

Boru

I doubt those actually work all that well.

Teaching evolution seems far more effective.

Teaching evolution won't work unless the religionists accept the teaching. They've shown themselves to be remarkably resistant to that.

Boru

I think it acts more as a preventative. But it's not the best method. Though learning about evolution was definitely a step in my de-conversion.

A better method seems to be social sexual freedom and prosperity.

But religion is dying quite slowly in America. North West Europe is a bigger success story in terms of de-Christianisation, though Islam might be a trickier issue.

Education, logic and reason.

Question/Challange the justifications they put forward for their belief system.

You should start from the peripheral things. Boru mentions that you should start by talking about evolution, but that's too close/ obvious. So by peripheral approach, I mean that you should start with the subject of gay people - Christians are usually taught by the church that gay people are wicked and secretly communist agents who are trying to overthrow the government, so you show them "Will and Grace" where they can see that gay people are normal like everyone else. Or the church teaches Christians that Jews still steal Christian children to eat them, so you show them Seinfeld and they see that Jews are people like them.

So when they see that the church lied to them about gays and Jews, they slowly get curious about what else are they wrong about, and you slowly come to telling them about evolution and how there is no evidence of the existence of gods.

These kinds of TV shows helped people abandon religion and religious leaders know it, that's why you can hear them talking about the "dangers of secularism".

I'm not interested in deconverting the religious. As for countering it, that has to be done early in life, and should also be supporting later by a solid education in critical thinking.

(October 24, 2023 at 4:43 am)FrustratedFool Wrote: I doubt those actually work all that well.

Teaching evolution seems far more effective.

No? Teaching them evolution will just make them adopt secularism/social darwinism as their religion.