I find it all quite amusing. Most people in the world live in a continual delusional state.
As readers of my blog know, I believe that given the right conditions, anyone can be made to believe any damned thing. That’s why there are so many different religions.
Persuasion has many names and forms.
Advertising
Indoctrination
Peer pressure
Hypnosis
Brainwashing
I wonder if a team of well-funded atheists could devise a legal and ethical method of reducing people’s religious faith. It would probably require testing lots of different methods until you found out what cocktail of messages worked best, but I think it would work.
This is important because the people with the most intense religious beliefs are threatening to destroy the United States. We wouldn’t have to eliminate the faith of our enemies; it would be enough if we weakened their belief that God rewards them for killing infidels. We’d just be rounding their edges, so to speak.
I’m sure that the direct approach would never work, as in “Your God isn’t real,” no matter how many times you repeated it. And I’m sure that no logical argument would make a difference. We would need to find the back door.
It would be easy to find volunteers for the research. I think lots of people would sign up to test their faith. You could tell people exactly what you plan on doing and still have them lining up.
The first thing I would test is context. If you expose highly religious people to the history of other religions, they will make the connection that prophets come and go all the time. And it would be obvious that (other) people are easily fooled. At first, the believer would think he was lucky that all those others got fooled and he didn’t, because his prophet is real. But this is just the start of the process.
Then I would expose the believer to some basics of psychology. The goal would be to show him how easily the average person can be made to believe the most ridiculous things in every possible context, from monsters under the bed to alien abductions. Unless you see lots of examples, you tend to assume that delusions are rare, when in fact they are the norm for all of us.
Then I would expose the believers to the literature of skeptics, to teach them how to critically evaluate claims in general. So far, none of this information would be directed at the subjects own religion. It is simply education.
Next would be a review of the history of Christianity from the viewpoint of historians, not religious people. When you show the heavy hand of human beings in the shaping of religion, it tends to erode your belief that God wrote a book and slipped it under your pillow.
When you’re done providing this information to your test subjects, you let it soak in for a few months and then ask them about their religious faith. I think their faith would be reduced. Using the scientific method, you keep repeating the process using different methods until you find out what set of knowledge most erodes faith.
Eventually you could create a book that is the sum of the best methods. Then all we need to do is air drop about a billion of them on the Middle East, close all of our embassies, pull out and wait a generation.
The book would immediately be banned by the authorities, but that would make them all the more popular with the young.
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