Has anyone discovered a successful way to make religious people atheist?

[AFTT47]

Give their lives meaning. Give them something to strive toward. Give them hope.
Thats the real enemy. That emptiness. Religion is just a symptom, an infection that occupies that gaping wound.

Absolutely.

I've been into internet atheism since the early 90s, before the web. The newsgroup alt.atheism was the thing then. I remember the first people coming out with the radical idea that logic doesn't work with theists. You have to appeal to their emotions. They were right. We should have a FAQ about this.

Do you ever watch Star Trek? Aren't the Vulcans cool? I don't know if a race like that is even possible (nevermind desirable) but here is one fact: Humans cannot be like that. It doesn't matter your understanding of logic, your intelligence or your desire to be impartial. Humans are inherently emotional. All information going into your brain goes through an emotional filter. It is impossible to overcome that through intelligence or will. It is hard-wired. You might do better than your fellow man. You might even be hard-wired in such a way that you are emotionally predisposed to logic and science. I'm sure I am.

I was first exposed to Genesis at ~ 6 years old in Catholic Catechism. I utterly rejected it. It wasn't because I was employing critical thinking at that age. Indeed, I later eagerly bought up the idea of UFOs as alien visitors and artifacts like the pyramids as being of alien origin. This was AFTER I had rejected the idea of the Christian God and self-identified as an atheist. I was not emotionally attached to the idea of God while I WAS emotionally attached to the idea of alien visitors. I later saw a documentary explaining in detail how the pyramids could have been built with primitive techniques. My view of alien pyramid builders collapsed. But that's not because I am particularly smart of logical. It's because my brain is emotionally predisposed to scientific arguments. They resonate with me.

So what makes us better than those who are emotionally predisposed to religious arguments? NOTHING. But we do have an advantage. It can be demonstrated that the scientific method is the most reliable method ever developed for establishing whether a proposition is true or not. But emotion can blind one to that truth.