A Manual for Creating Atheists

[mal4mac]

Anyone read "A Manual for Creating Atheists" by Peter Boghossian? Is it a good manual? He comes across well on video. I like his idea of becoming a street epistemologist:

http://psuvanguard.com/news/faith-is-not-a-virtue-a-q-and-a-with-peter-boghossian/

[russellb]

i read some of a question and answer session with him but was reminded of a dictum by jonathon swift (i think) "what people haven't been reasoned into they can't be reasoned out of"

[mal4mac]

But as long as you keep on thinking, and thinking, and thinking, and reading, there's hope!

"And I thought and thought and thought. But I just didn't have enough to go on, so I didn't really come to any resolution. I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn't know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins's books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
Douglas Adams The Salmon of Doubt, p 99.

How come it took until his early thirties? Perhaps it's down to the terrible bias in British education, you get on the arts track at 14 and your knowledge of science is nullified unless you take desperate action (like going to the public library, rather than the pub, on occasions.)

http://www.richarddawkins.net/letters?category=Converts

[Tor_Hershman]

This'll take care of those thar god & devil thingys

youtube.com/watch?v=_m6qC6FCiY0

[Lykren]

I haven't read it but I'm good friends with Peter Boghossian!