Reductio ad Absurdum: How to most efficently communicate with theists

[_Velvet_]

As a new forum user, let me remind you that you're not on christian forums any more and we don't evince the same reverence for unevidenced bullshit they do over there. Go to a country where you're belittled and discriminated for your belifs before you start giving out about angry atheists. A little humiliation might make you realise why sometimes we get narky.

I've never been a Christian, nor used their forums.

I already do realise why sometimes you guys get narky, but as we (the critical thinker) are the only ones actually reasoning on the room, it falls on us to instruct people who can't think on how to think, and being angry (even with good reasons) its not a good strategy for achieving that.

This made me want to tell a history about something that happened yesterday, it is on topic but its a wall of text, so bear with me on that:
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I'm a Sergeant of Brazil's Air Force, yesterday I had people with a heated religion argument on my workplace, they were doing a Christian vs Ubandist thing and I had to intervene because the Christian majority were being dicks to the Ubandist guy.

I could've just scold them, or even punished the whole bunch because we have rules against any religion speech inside the military base, but to what end? They would still be intolerant anyways, so instead I tried to provoke them to think critically about what they were doing.

I first evoked Jesus's golden rule, to reprehend their behavior, and as they pointed towards the Bible sometimes saying otherwise I lead them to question themselves if they rather follow Jesus or the Bible when it does says otherwise.

This alone made some of them scratch their heads.

People eventually calmed down as we continued, and I started slowly introducing the "Divine Message Inneficiency" problem as it is one of my favorites to make people rethink about the Bible reliability...

I pointed several ways that the Bible doesn't really seems like something the perfect God would use to convey his message, it allows for multiple readings and God can't really be like that, it being "unchanging" it has to be only one way to please him, and what should they do if they got the wrong reading?

(Making they realise the Bible its just a book its the first step of making the whole thing crumble, but you CAN'T attack the god figure, not for now, or they will enter "faith mode")

Asked them, if they somehow got the wrong reading, or if the book isn't really the word of the God, they expect to go to Hell forever for it? Or they deserve to be forgiven because they were willing to serve God but got the wrong readings by mistake? So what should the Ubandist guy do if he maybe got the wrong religion by mistake or by his parents teaching him Ubanda? He is really trying to please God, just like they are, what fault he has if god's message its so muddled it can be mistaken by other books and teachings?

And what the fuck its this all about? Lots of people everywhere on the world trying to please God, but they all got wrong books or wrong readings readings and now they are blowing themself up by mistake? What if you got it wrong too?

I said them to read the Bible with that in mind, trying to figure if it really can be God's word, as they are "familliar with God's kind and loving nature" they should be able to tell it is a human book.

And this was the end of it (for now), and I don't want to push them too hard, the ubandist guy called me later and thanked me for the way I dealed with the situation.
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We may perhaps not be as persuasive as Socrates, or even Sam Harris on inviting people to think, but I think we must try our very best regardless, its our responsibility as "the thinking person on the room" to teach the others how to think, as the end of intolerance and hate won't come from fighting back with some childish butthurted speech.

You need to be calm as you have to focus on your strategy development, if you are letting your feelings get in the way you are just doing it wrong, you are not being persuasive and you will fail to reason critically and will end up just feeding the hate, while on field you would be a dead soldier.

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When I mock the afflicted, I'm not doing it to help them.  They're lost souls.  I;m not even interested in getting them to think about their religion (I'd rather see them think a whole lot -less- about their religions). I do it so that we don't live in a world where ludicrous and barbaric religious beliefs hide behind the veil of polite and undeserved respect.

Let me remind you of the field here.

We've got one group of ghouls that advocate stringing up the better man.
We've got another that expect to see the general of their divine master race appear, someday..and crush the rest of us underfoot.
We've got another group that keeps blowing shit up.

I don't think there are ANY lost souls, they are just lost in a sea of stupidity, they are people (otherwise) just like you and me who are able to think objectively on most subjects (aside from their delusion), if we had born a while back we would think that the earth its flat (yes I'm aware some people still think that, lol)

Our enemy its the stupidity, the ignorance, not the people... and our weapon its education, we can try to teach people out of misery.

You gotta understand that the religion idea its designed to be very appealing, they are ignorant and their familiy told about religion very early in childhood, its NOT only their fault that they are stuck in there and hating you as enemy of their lord.

It can even be argued that we are to blame, because we sometimes act like I said you guys do (everyone does it sometimes), we have the knowledge to unveil their delusion, but we either don't care enough for our drowning fellow (like you), or are still YET too incompetent or powerless to teach them efficiently how to surpass their delusions (the skepticals in general, tho Dawkins/Harris/Dennet are trying really really hard)