A Manual for Creating Atheists (Kindle highlights)

God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. Barking mad! (loc. 136-37)
A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless. (loc. 277-78)
If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. “Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway. (loc. 309-11)
Another way to think about “belief without evidence” is to think of an irrational leap over probabilities. (loc. 311-12)
A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision. (loc. 402-3)
Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world. (loc. 442-43)
If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value. (loc. 452-53)
Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities. (loc. 473-74)
Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth. (loc. 705)
Faith taints or at worst removes our curiosity about the world, what we should value, and what type of life we should lead. Faith replaces wonder with epistemological arrogance disguised as false humility. (loc. 713-14)
Once we understand that we don’t possess knowledge, we have a basis to go forward in a life of examination, wonder, and critical reflection. (loc. 717-18)
Wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know are a solid basis for a life worth living. (loc. 719-20)
What Kierkegaard means is that if you want to live a full, meaningful human life—catch hold of anxiety and don’t let it go. Use anxiety to follow your thoughts as a guide to see where it leads you. Don’t try to escape. Let it energize your life; let it bring you awareness not only of your ignorance but also of your desire to understand moments in every experience. At least for Kierkegaard, holding onto anxiety is a key to a fulfilled life. (loc. 1079-82)
Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition. (loc. 1084-86)
Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network. (loc. 776-77)
Combine clustering in like-minded communities with filter bubbles, then put that on top of a cognitive architecture that predisposes one to belief (Shermer, 2012) and favors confirmation bias, then throw in the fact that critical thinking and reasoning require far more intellectual labor than acceptance of simple solutions and platitudes, then liberally sprinkle the virulence of certain belief systems, then infuse with the idea that holding certain beliefs and using certain processes of reasoning are moral acts, and then lay this entire mixture upon the difficulty of just trying to make a living and get through the day with any time for reflection, and voilà: Doxastic closure! 5 (loc. 840-45)
Bringing facts into the discussion is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem: the problem is with epistemologies people use, not with conclusions people hold. (loc. 1253-54)
By undermining faith one is able to undermine almost all religions simultaneously, and it may be easier to help someone to abandon their faith than it is to separate them from their religion. Your interventions should target faith, not religion. (loc. 1314-16)
This is how the vast majority of believers experience their religious life—as a communal and social event that adds meaning, purpose, and joy to their lives (Argyle, 2000, p. 111). Attacks on religion are often perceived as attacks on friends, families, communities, and relationships. As such, attacking religion may alienate people, making it even more difficult to separate them from their faith. (loc. 1324-27)
Religion is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier to reason and rationality. The problem is not that people are reading ancient texts. I read Shakespeare with my son. I don’t, however, think that Iago, Hamlet, and Lear were historical figures. I also don’t derive my ultimate moral authority from Shakespeare’s works. I don’t want to kill people who have rival interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. Nor do I attempt to bring Othello into decisions at the ballot box. (loc. 1329-33)
Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem. (loc. 1339-40)
First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?” (loc. 1421)
Occasionally, when I’m pressed for time and can’t give my interlocutor a comprehensive Socratic treatment (for example, in line at the grocery store), I use two powerful dialectical shortcuts. First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?” (loc. 1419-21)
Second, I’ll ask, “How would you differentiate your belief from a delusion? We have unshakable testimony of countless people who feel in their heart that the Emperor of Japan is divine, or that Muhammad’s revelations in the Koran are true. How do you know you’re not delusional?” (loc. 1432-34)
Instead they’ll reply, rarely with anger, more often with sincerity, “Well how do you know that your beliefs aren’t delusions? How do you know you’re not wrong?” To which I respond, “I could very well be wrong about any of my beliefs. I could also misconstrue reality. The difference between misconstruing reality and being delusional is the willingness to revise a belief. If I’m genuinely willing to revise my belief I’m much less likely to think it’s a delusion. Are you willing to revise your belief that [insert belief here]”? (loc. 1439-43)
The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly. (loc. 1924-25)
When appropriate, incorporate strategies noted in chapter 4: be attentive to context, don’t develop adversarial relationships or negative tones, “roll with it,” divorce belief from morality, focus on epistemology and not metaphysics, target faith not religion, and model the behavior you want the subject to emulate. Develop a safe space for discussion, almost a camaraderie. (loc. 2277-80)
Helping people, especially children, to be comfortable with not knowing, yet at the same time encouraging the development of curiosity, of wonder, and of a zest to explore the world, is a crucial and indispensable undertaking. (loc. 2471-72)
Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism—hypothesis testing— that weeds out false claims. (loc. 2823-24)
Claims that come about as a result of a scientific process are held as tentatively true by scientists—unlike claims of faith that are held as eternally true. Related to this, claims that come about as the result of a scientific process are falsifiable, that is, there is a way to show the claims are false. (loc. 2825-27)
I’ve never really understood how removing a bad way to reason will make it difficult to get through the day. If anything, it would seem that correcting someone’s reasoning would significantly increase their chances of getting through the day. With reliable forms of reasoning comes the capability of crafting conditions that enable people to navigate life’s obstacles. By using a more reliable form of reasoning, people are more capable of bringing about conditions that enable them to flourish. (loc. 2925-28)
“What people believe, and how they act, matter. They particularly matter in a democracy where people have a certain amount of influence over the lives of their fellow citizens. My intent is not to be a jerk. I don’t buy into the notion that criticizing an idea makes me a bad person. A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person. We are not our ideas. Ideas don’t deserve dignity; people deserve dignity. I’m criticizing an idea because that idea is not true, and the fact that people think it is true has dangerous consequences.” (p. 156)
Contemporary academic leftism turned the rational analysis of criticizing a process one uses to know reality from an epistemological critique into a moral taboo. (p. 173)
Multiculturalism contributed to this confusion by extending immutable properties of people—like race, gender, sexual orientation, religion—to all epistemic systems, cultural ways of knowing, faith traditions, local mythologies, etc. (p. 174)
There are people of different faiths and different races who experience genuine instances of discrimination and hatred. Conflating the categories of ideas and people, and medicalizing rational criticism, both demeans the experience of people who suffer from discrimination and simultaneously tosses away a root liberty: the freedom to rationally analyze and critique. (p. 174)
Faith is not an immutable characteristic; people leave and switch faith traditions. It is not like gender or ethnicity. (p. 178)
Faith is a process of attempting to know the world that will decrease the likelihood of coming to true conclusions, or in philosophical parlance, using faith will not yield warranted belief. One way we know this is that different faith traditions make competing claims and these claims cannot all be correct—yet they can all be false. (p. 180)
Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue. (p. 200)
It’s important we believe things that are true. It’s important there’s some lawful correspondence between what we believe and the actual state of affairs. Only when our beliefs accurately correspond to reality are we able to mold external conditions that enable us to flourish. (p. 201)
It matters how we talk about things. It matters what words we use. Certain words trap us into a make-believe picture of life—one that is false and misleading. (p. 202)
If you care about the future and you want something to get done—then do it. You cannot know the future, so take action. Don’t wait for things to happen. Don’t pray. Don’t have faith. Don’t rely upon imagined entities. Act. (p. 203)
What figures like Nietzsche teach us is that the sense of meaninglessness is a result of millennia of dependency on mythological thinking. When myths are shown to be false, the result is a sense of despair because we’ve been dependent upon them for so long. The step out of meaninglessness should not be dependency on a new myth (the New Age movement, Scientology, Mormonism), but self-sufficiency and a tough-mindedness that is weary of resting the sense of meaning on what someone else has said or done or promised. We have to earn meaning for ourselves. (p. 222)