Atheists dealing with their religious families

[Clueless Morgan]

I'm reading A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian right now and it has some interesting ideas about how to approach conversations with theists - he is specifically aiming at deconverting people or disabusing them of their faith (whether that's your thing or not), but I think it is valuable in understanding the process of getting someone to recognize their own cognitive dissonance.

That's a great book! Peter is one of my facebook friends!

I literally JUST missed his debut of this book at a local bookstore where he was doing a reading (he and I both live in Portland) and I was super pissed when I realized I had missed it!

I'm just starting chapter 7 "Anti-Apologetics 101" and am enjoying it tremendously so far. I think it's as valuable a book to evaluate your own reasoning processes as it could be to deconvert people. Whether it's successful as a manual for deconverting people, only time will tell.

as far as The Bible goes, read it. You may be surprised how entertained you'll be when you discover how absurd a book it really is. The things you will read in there will blow your mind, it's a wonder how anybody could ever get anesthetized by it.

I have read it, granted I was like 17 when I read it and I don't recall very much of it other than the "WTF?" reactions I had. My concern about having The Bible Conversation with a theist, especially the theist I'm referring to (her name is Stephanie), would be that I would have nothing to say when she says, "Just read Matthew 5:17: For when Jesus rises again, all will eat grilled cheese sandwiches!" or whatever.

I've read several books about the bible (thanks again to Min for the one he sent me!) but I don't have good enough instant recall under pressure to come up with information to refute anything a bible-believer would say to me.

In that respect, having my mom know that I'm reading Forged is probably a good thing in a sense - she might be interested in reading it and she has better recall than I do (and goes to the same movie night where we met Stephanie). The draw back to that is that if Stephanie is able to refute anything in even a remotely plausible way I have a feeling my mom would buy her explanation hook, line and sinker.

I have a Bible that my girlfriend gave me (it's pink), I wrote "A Guide to Atheism on the cover and spine of it in sharpie marker. I go through it from time to time and highlight all of the insane things I find as I go. I have post-its that mark particularly useful information that comes up in debates, and am actually beginning to memorize, in sequence, the order of the books within it.

I've marked up some of the sicker passages in the bible I have just for easy reference but I don't particularly find it necessary that I need to memorize the names of the books in order. To each their own in that regard - maybe you could look up a mneumoic to help you remember? There has got to be one out there somewhere...