RE: Heated debate on evolution with brother
January 7, 2017 at 2:52 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2017 at 2:53 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(January 3, 2017 at 3:13 am)MyelinSheath Wrote: At that point I had to just withdraw. There was simply no getting through to him. He kept reiterating that he was open to the evidence, but that there is no evidence. The hostility he displayed was tremendous.
Any tips on good information sources to send him?
Oh the communication! It is the problem how to reach people that cling to these fairy tales from the Bible like creation or Noah and the ark. Sure lots of people mentioned that you give him a lecture on evolution or even give him a book on evolution and yes that is correct, but the psychology of these people is such that you can't just start talking about it. They built a defense around it. You have to have a timing.
First you need them to relax and know that you won't be a dick about it. Confront them with their beliefs, that they hear it out loud, like "So you believe a 600 year old man but two animals of all species in a giant box - mind you it was not a ship - and live with them for over a year?"
-"Yes."
"How do you gather he did this? How did he feed them? Where did he get the water for drinking?"
-"Well it rained for 40 days so they got the water."
"It rained for 40 days but they were in the giant wooden box for 370 days. Not to mention they had only one window."
etc.
One of the good steps in learning how to talk with people with such deep religious delusions is for you to read a book "Manual for Creating Atheists" by Peter Boghossian.
If you don't feel like reading you can watch people on youtube doing the street epistemology inspired by the book I mentioned. Here's Aron Ra having a crashcourse in it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZMzR2z6ENM
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"