"Are Christians Delusional?" Richard Carrier Skepticon 3

He is the author of meaning and goodness without God and not of impossible faith. He has a PhD in ancient history and here is Richard Carrier. We need a video, although I thought we had that. I suppose not. Oh, it's happening or it's not. your speakers are so finicky water yes video now we need a microphone hey slides are half the fun man how many skeptics does it take to turn on a projector properly while we wait for that? I will tell you that my talk continues. It is about this book called The Christian Deception, it is edited by John Loftus and it has several chapters and I am going to talk about that book and why you should buy it, it will be very useful to you.

It is also the book you should give as a gift. to your Christian friends if you want to present something that will outrage them but also educate them. We don't have it yet? The title of this book, The Christian Delusion, is a take on Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, and Richard Dawkins came under some fire for being unerudite or not directly responding to what Christian apologists argue as if he were out of touch. or whatever, so we took that criticism as a challenge and we put together a group of experts who are actually experts in all these different fields and we put together a bunch of chapters that are scholarly, well-researched and exhaustively cited and that answer the questions. critiques and apologetics of the field and we focus on Christianity, of course, because that is the main bane of our existence today uh not that you know that Islamic people don't read our books, so that's a little useless, but Christians are ultimately forced, uh, so, uh, do we have it coming?

No, God hates you, yes, well, I'll have to do it. have more time afterwards, right and make amends, is there something wrong here? No, you would have a blank screen if it was, yes, yes, you would have to have a blue screen if something was happening. Okay, everyone, PR, which is a classic. example like me I can see it's happening so if everyone prayed this would be a test of answered prayer okay it's warmed up for just a second yeah call me you or call Rebecca Watson buttons yeah JT wants me to do it. uh, he calls Rebecca Watson and sells buttons.

I'm too evenly matched with Keel to do that kind of thing, although I think there's actually a 5050 chance which of us will get drunker, you know, faster, it probably depends on who buys more buttons. Yes, well, no, it's true. JT says it depends on who buys the most buttons. He is trying to plug the buttons, which is a way to donate and have a little souvenir of this event. And help support not only this event, but also hopefully encourage. and maybe give you a little extra money to support

skepticon

4 next year, but in terms of the drinking game, I give you 5050 odds on which of us will collapse first, um, however, all of you wearing Team Watson Watson buttons , logically it makes sense. that everyone should buy me drinks tonight, right, I'm just saying, okay, let's get started.

The topic of my talk today is: Are Christians deceived? Let's find out. First we have to define the terms. What do we understand by deception? There's the colloquial. feeling of delusion, which is a false belief or opinion, for example, you have delusions of grandeur, is a common phrase, um, I'm not talking about that, the other is from psychiatry, which is a false belief that resists reason or confrontation with real facts. now there is a politically correct version of this psychiatric term of psychiatry that you will find in actual diagnostic models that makes an exception for religion without actually telling you what it is doing and this is the actual formal definition: a false belief based on a belief incorrect. inference about external reality that holds firmly despite what almost everyone else believes, notice that insertion there and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary, now I want you to take that part in italics and take out and read the definition the formal psychiatric definition a false belief based on an incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary, obviously, if you remove that little section, that little part in italics, you're still talking about an illusion I mean, it's pretty clear what we're talking about here just because you have everyone in the room fooled doesn't mean that suddenly it's not an illusion anymore you just have the whole room fooled uh and anyway so I'm I'm not going to use the politically correct definition.

I'm going to talk just about the basic definition: a false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual facts, and say that not all false beliefs are delusions. There are many different types of false belief and I could give a whole lecture on all the different types, but I'm just going to talk about a delusion as a particular type of false belief and for a false belief to be a delusion it has to meet these three criteria. The first is certainty, it has to be held with absolute conviction, if you are a little hesitant about it, it really doesn't qualify.

It also has to have the capacity to stimulate that means it cannot be changed by convincing counterarguments or evidence to the contrary, and that is One of the key characteristics of delusion and the third criterion is the impossibility or falsity of the content, in other words, it has to be implausible, strange or patently false. Now, there are different types of delusions. Delirium comes in many degrees. my official Dr. Carrier delusion scale, uh, you go from being mildly

delusional

, now we're all mildly

delusional

, actually, psychological psychology has shown that we all harbor a variety of different types of mild delusions, uh, they often think that They are more attractive than they are, women often think that they are less attractive than they really are and they can prove this with objective tests they can do, such as having everyone in the room look at your photo and rate how attractive you are and then tell you.

They ask you to rate how attractive you are and you can see the difference between the average objective measure and your measure. These are the types of mild delusions that have one of the most common is that people overestimate how competent they are at a skill and, ironically, how much the less competent you are, the more you overestimate competence in skill and this is a universal thing, it's the way our brains work and anyway, there are mild delusions, uh, then there are mostly delusional people, there are people who worry and then they go crazy and then of course they go crazy now, for today I'm just going to talk about the mostly delusional Christians.

I'm not talking about worrying Christians or totally crazy Christians. I am going to talk only about ordinary and mostly delusional Christians. Nor am I going to talk about slightly delusional Christians. What are we talking about Christianity? Let's define Christianity here now. I can't take credit for this. I didn't make this quote up. I don't know who the author is. Congratulations to them, whoever they are. Maybe someone can figure it out and write a blog. that or something like that, but you can find it on the Internet. It is actually a completely 100% accurate description of what Christianity is.

The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat its flesh and tell it telepathically that you accept it. as your teacher so that I can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a talking snake convinced a ribom to eat from a magic tree and there really is not a single proposition there that the average Christian can honestly Deny, Yes, that's what we believe, what can I say now? There are a lot of Christians who have really taken a lot of heat for that, so we've created a new and improved Christianity over the last 50 or so years.

So where do they approve that all this Eve stuff is nonsense from Ribom's talking snake? Well maybe that's all a myth but I still have an imaginary friend who magically manipulates the world for me and also magically impregnated a woman 2000 years ago and she bore him a son who underwent an ancient blood sacrifice ritual to dispel a curse placed on me, thus ensuring that I will be immortal, although I have never seen this work for anyone else before, so that is what we are dealing with, that is Christianity, that is the belief we have. What we're going to prove is that it's a hoax, now there are also a variety of Christians, um, there are nominally apathetic Christians, Christians who just say they're Christians but don't really believe any of it, or don't even care if it's true. or not. uh, I'm not talking about those Christians today, there are also Christians who don't really know if it's true, it's some kind of metaphor or something, uh, they have different kinds of ideas, very liberal Christians with whom you can often have a very difficult situation. time trying to specify to them what they really believe uh, I'm not talking about those Christians either, I'm talking about the Christians that is true as they told the Christians um and you know the same ones that say that everything is true uh and Jesus comes from the outer space to kill you soon, uh, those are real ped results. 40% of the American public believes that, by the way, uh, so we could talk about maybe about 60% of Christians, that's true, as was said, but they're not so sure when.

Jesus is going to come and kill us, but you know, there's also a divide between what I call the mildly delusional Christians and the mostly delusional Christians and the mildly delusional ones have a personal belief in God like God exists and Jesus was a great guy, but they. You know they'll have room to move, they'll, uh, they'll be a little hesitant about the Divine themes of Jesus and so on, um, these kind of happy go lucky Christians, I'm not going to go. that we're going to talk about today, I think it's kind of a mild delusion, it's like someone who thinks they can communicate telepathically with their pets, um, it doesn't really hurt anyone, uh, you know, it's still a delusion, but you know what I'm talking about that Jesus is truly the Son of God and all that and that's what I mean by "mostly delusional" uh at least I claim it's mostly delusional, let's see if I'm right now. friend named Zalmoxis who they insist is really real, in fact it is not imaginary and they will never die because this ancient demigod cleansed their soul with blood magic that grants them the power to live forever in a magical place that no one can see now, which you would do immediately.

Consider that as an illusion it is strange, implausible and patently false, so the cult of Mox is, in fact, attested by the historian Herodotus in 425 BC. C., 500 years before Christianity. Let me remind you that that is a description of an actual religion practiced 500 years before Christianity and possibly. still practiced at the time Christianity was invented seems very familiar, don't you think? Another example that I am going to give you is the cult of the Gate of Heaven. I'm sure many of you know about this cult. He believed that a spaceship was behind the Hail Bop comet that would come to their rescue and transfer their souls from their current shells, their current bodies into special new bodies on the spaceship and they were going to live, fly and live forever on the spaceship. and they were so convinced of this belief that several dozen of them committed mass suicide, but in reality not all of them did, by the way, there are still Heaven's Gators out there and they still believe that this thing could emerge as a new new thing, you know the new Scientology in 50 years, who knows, but I must point out that their belief was based on the idea of ​​getting new bodies in an alien spaceship flying alongside us, we consider this as patently absurd, implausible and strange, but at least it has all the elements of plausibility in the sense that spaceships are at least scientifically possible and the idea of ​​having your body or having the information in your brain reprinted in another body that is actually better built than the current one is not only plausible in the feeling like it's physically possible, but we'll probably be able to do it within a thousand years of technological development, so they're not that far away at The Fringe, and yet we all recognize that this is crazy.

Crazy idea now. this is compare this what Christians believe they believe they're going to get new bodies in a magical alternate universe um that's not that plausible there's no science to back this up there's no magical alternate universes that we have evidence of So, actually, it's the same belief or at least less plausible even than what the Heaven's Gate people believed and their whole theory that they really had figured out is the idea of ​​quantum teleportation and neural engineering, the quantum teleportation of information in their brains. currents to neurons. redesigning the brains of their new bodies on the spaceship versus the Christian idea that God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his own blood had enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and killed it, which of these? tworeligions makes more sense, so if the zelm moxian and the Heaven Gators were deceptive, so are the Christians, that is the point I am trying to make here and we have achieved one of the three main requirements here: impossibility or falsity of strange implausible content or fake F patent now I won't leave it like that.

I'm going to point out how you can actually make this case using Christian deception. Christian deception is divided into five parts, I'll talk about the second part first, uh, and that's why the Bible is not the word of God and there's a reason why. that we break it down like this and I will point out that later there is a chapter by Edward Babinsky on the cosmology of the Bible it is important to keep in mind that the God of the Old Testament this is the Old Testament the voice of God in quotes speaks to the Assumption routinely that the Earth is flat and supported by four pillars now if not even God knew how the world was made, you can rest assured, you can be pretty sure that the Bible was not written by God or by anyone who was in communication with him, this basic idea of ​​water, there is a giant sea in outer space, in fact outer space is an ocean and then there is a big metal firmament that God put to separate that ocean from the ocean below and then the atmosphere is between the atmosphere .

This great dome is supported by four pillars which are the pillars of the sky and then the Earth is flat and supported by four pillars which are the pillars of the Earth this is a common cosmology it was believed that this is the structure of the universe as all believed neighbors of Israel when the Old Testament was written the Egyptians the Babylonians and the Sumerians babinsky shows this documents they extensively use the same metaphor, the same terminologies, the same concepts, everything worked in the same place, so when you see it in the Bible , you know that this is just a product of their culture, this is not, it is not, you know an inspired and revealing text from the god of the universe, that God who would certainly know that the Earth was round and it was not, you know, outer space was not filled with water, another point, uh, and this is something I won't go into detail about. because he would be preaching to the choir, but you know these things, the Bible and modern scholarship.

Modern scholars almost all agree that the Bible is, don't say it like that, but when you add up all the things they say, you say oh well that's what you're saying well, don't tell anyone that's what we're saying but that's what we're saying um the Old Testament and the New Testament now Paul Tobin has a good summary it's a short chapter that summarizes some of the best examples of course there are hundreds of these but he summarized some of the best examples that are more warranted by the best scholarship and cites scholars cites scholars on scholarship that support each of these five points that the Bible is inconsistent in itself is not supported by archeology, in fact, archeology refutes the Bible at many points, it contains fairy tales and failed prophecies, demonstrably failed prophecies and many forgeries, both the New Testament and the Old Testament contain books that we know are forgeries if they were not written down. when or by who they claim to be and that's conventional scholarship, by the way, it's not Fringe at all, so you know the book can't be the word of God if these things are true and then John Lus has a chapter on what have. here like a miscommunication uh those of you who know the movie will understand the line but I won't go into that um and he demonstrates in elaborate detail that one thing God would do if God inspired the Bible or wrote it or whatever , he would make sure his message was clear, he would make sure you understood it like this, these are the customs, this is what is moral, this is what is right and what is wrong, this is what I want from you, this is what's going to happen, but It's not, it's a hugely confusing text, in fact, it's so confusing that it causes massive confusion among Christian churches who actually killed each other over these.

One of the classic examples is: You know, can I have sex slaves or not? Actually, the Bible is consistent on this. You can, there's really no passage in the Bible that says you can, frankly, and there are three passages in the Bible that explicitly state that you can and give specific instructions on how to handle your sex slaves so that the Bible is not of God. The third part is why the Christian God is not perfectly good, so let's say you say well, maybe the Bible is full of a lot of errors and stuff or it's all metaphorical or something and then we can't be sure. whether it is the word of God, but at least God is perfectly good, there are two arguments against that, the first is that the god that is represented in the Bible, the character of Yahweh, is a moral monster, and Héctor Ávalos has a great chapter showing that Yahweh as described in the Old Testament is as big an idiot as all the other gods around him among the Samarians and Babylonians etc.

I mean, he's the same asshole, he basically does the same things, he says the same things that you would recognize. Basically, you don't know the kind of person you would respect or adore, and as Hector Havos calls him a moral monster, which is the polite way of saying it, there's actually a guy named Paul Copan who actually said no, no, God. He did all those things, but they're not really monstrous because God had excuses, uh, or God can do whatever he wants, um, and Hector Aalos brings him into it, but it shows that all the surrounding biblical codes, all the surrounding law codes , uh, of, the people around Israel were as enlightened or more enlightened than the code of laws that we find in the New Testament.

I am referring to the old testament, which shows that the Christian God is not perfectly good if you go by the Bible. God, well, let's say you reject the Bible God, you still have this idea of ​​God left right well John lus has a chapter called the Darwinian problem of evil where he decisively demonstrates that suffering The unnecessary suffering of animals and I'm not talking about animals of farm, I'm just talking about normal animals in the wild for the last four billion years, that monstrous and unnecessary suffering is unforgivable and there is no possible way that God could create this universe and still be considered perfectly good and he addresses these answers This is why many Christian apologists are really concerned. about this plot and I have been for years, you may have never heard of it, but they've come up with a lot of really weird and crazy excuses to get away from it, and some of them are pretty shocking and he did his research fantastically. and he documents each of them in response to they're good, he's good.

I also recommend this additional chapter that I wrote that did not appear in the book called the will of God. There are 24 verses from the Old Testament that show decisively what uh Yahweh was and you can find it on our companion site for the book uh sites.google.com sit in the Christian deception, then there is why Jesus is not the Son risen of God, part four, that's the other part of the Christian argument, right? be the Son of God, otherwise Christianity is not true in any truly metaphysical sense and Robert Price has a chapter where he shows that the widespread rejection of the gospels as not being historical evidence is valid even though many recent Christian scholars They try to argue against it.

In this I have my chapter on the resurrection where I point out that we have no adequate historical evidence to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, in fact the evidence looks the other way, uh and uh, this is actually my best take on this argument. , so If you want to find the ultimate downfall of Christian resurrection apologetics, that's the chapter you go to and then John LTA says that at best Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet, which clearly shows conclusively that Jesus said he would return in about 20 to 40 years. The fact that he didn't do so decisively proves that he was wrong and since God cannot have failed to predict his own return, Jesus cannot have been God, so we get here.

Christianity is definitely implausible, strange and evidently. It's not true and you all know it, um, but you can see the case is laid out there and it has nice short chapters that really get to the point and are fully documented. The second part is designed to refute the Bible as the word of God, Christians, the third part is. designed to refute God as good Christians, the fourth part is designed to refute Jesus as God Christians and it really does, I mean there's no argument left for you to make that make any reasonable sense, but just in case, in in case there were any Christians left.

We added the first part in the front and the fifth part in the back and the first part really gives coherence to the whole book. The first part is the directions for I Don't Need Evidence, Christians, and the fifth part addresses, But We Need It, Christians, What Do I Do? With that I will do the fifth part at the end, but I will give you the general thesis. Here you can divide Christianity into several different forms and they all overlap, so they are not distinct forms, but when you add them all together. above you have a whole pizza pie when you eat all those pieces of pizza there is no pizza left so once you destroy all the different versions of christianity there is no christianity left to refute so let me get back to that point why doesn't society, oh, so you could call it the Jesus wheel for the Jesus wheel Pizza, uh, why doesn't society depend on the Christian faith, um, that's it, the argument is that okay, it could be false, but society would go to the bottom. hell in a hand basket.

If we abandon Christian belief, we should convince people to believe it anyway because it is good for society, necessary for society, and there are a variety of different ways this is argued. One, of course, is that Christianity provides the basis for moral values ​​and therefore if Christianity no one will be moral, so we really need to convince people that it is true, even if it is not. David Eller refutes this from the perspective of an anthropologist of religion. He is a true anthropologist of religion. He literally wrote the textbook on anthropology. of religion and he argues very convincingly and exhaustively that Christianity is just one basis among many for different moral views and it's not very good at that, so we don't need Christianity, there are plenty of options we can go with. replace Christianity. the other is atheism.

You often hear that atheism was the cause of the Holocaust. The subtext is that that's where we're going to go, if we get rid of Christianity, it'll be the Holocaust all over again and I'll tell you that right now. This is my favorite chapter by Héctor Ávalos in this book, uh, and you can tell that it has some weight because it's not mine, uh, and it says that it points out that atheism was not the cause of the Holocaust and it has a really excellent comparison. of the program, the stated written program of Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheranism and the Nazi program against the Jews, I mean, point for point, I mean, they are essentially identical, uh, while you don't find that in there is nothing of those points in Darwin for example, none of you can read all of Darwin's texts, you won't find the list of things Martin Luther must do to the Jews, but you get it from Martin Luther and he shows conclusively that the Nazis were B Nazism itself was basically a Christian movement, it was not an atheist movement, it was very Christian inspired by Christianity, specifically German forms of Christianity.

Martin Luther was one of them and of course he also proves that Hitler was not an atheist, um, contrary to popular myth. Another argument we need is that Christianity was responsible for modern science and you think, what the hell? I have a chapter on this that is right in my field. I study ancient sciences. I am an expert in them. uh, so when these Christians say these things, um, I know what, I definitely know what I'm talking about, uh, so I have this chapter called Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science, where I lay out the argument that they've actually made and I show why it's complete, uh, not just in terms of being completely illogical, but also in terms of being wrong on almost every point, but you might be wondering: who's making this argument?

Are you serious? Yes, there are several popular conservative textbooks that say this. I give one of them a quote from one of them as a new generation of historians, sociologists and philosophers of science have shown that biblical religion was not the enemy of science, but rather the intellectual Matrix that made it possible in the first place. place without the key ideas that Christianity, which is celebrated in the Bible and spread throughout Europe, science would never have happened; the evidence is incontrovertible; It was the rational theology of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation inspired by the explicit and implicit truths revealed in the Jewish Bible that led to the discoveries of science.modern that's a quote that I have others in my chapter of this book uh the whole paragraph is every line um there's also one that didn't appear in the book that you think might be missing uh it's obvious that Christianity gave us democracy if we we get rid of Christianity we get rid of democracy.

I have that chapter written, it's online, it's an update of an old article of mine called Christianity Was Not Responsible for American Democracy, it's also available on the Christian Delusion companion site, um. I'll give you a spoiler about the thesis of the thing, those dirty little pagans invented it, and there isn't a lick about democracy in the Bible, it's totally a pagan institution, so that brings us back to the last part, what is it. I don't need evidence, Christians, and this is one of the best sections of the book and I think you can read it and you really should read it because it doesn't just apply to religion, it applies to every decision you make in your life. life because it's going to educate you about how your brain works.

You evolved to make mistakes, your brain is inherently built by natural selection to make mistakes, uh, and you have to compensate for those mistakes if you're going to think rationally and accurately, and these chapters nail it. these things in various ways. David Eller talks about how Christian evangelists in foreign countries actually use established anthropological and psychological science against people to spread the faith, they use what anthropologists have learned and have several textbooks that explain how to manipulate people from different cultures to that they adopt the Christian belief and it is something very interesting. but it also teaches you how much of your mind is basically steeped in cultural assumptions that you take for granted and how much culture affects how you see and understand things and by showing how that is manipulated to control you, you can understand how to resist that manipulation and avoid the pitfalls of it and then Valerie Tero and Jason have long been into Christian belief through the lens of cognitive science and the malleability of the human mind, they both cover the whole psychology of these types of natural errors and I'll talk About that a bit more and John Loftus rounds it out by reviewing his Outsider Faith test, which is something he's famous for.

Actually, he is William Lane Craig's former Protege, so he knows William Lane Craig's tricks. He once he was an evangelical. intellectual under the command of him, he is now an avid unconditional atheist and what is the external test for faith. It's very simple and makes common sense. You really need to test your own religious claims and texts by the same standards you apply to other religions. That's all, that's all the proof of your religion. has to be approved if the statements and texts of your religion are fair, it is not better, however, then your religion is as false as theirs and this seems like an obvious thing to say and yet there are many Christians who, like You know, they were ruined by this and insisted. that it is wrong that this test does not apply that we can ignore this test and so on, which is surprising, but there are reasons why we need to test our religious belief or any worldview by the same standards that we test those we reject. , so if we reject a religion for reasons the religion we assume and not just religion political views anything else based on your geography and where you were other beliefs may have exactly the same background one of the reasons to have a clue about this is that the choice of religious belief is correlates positively with cultural and geographic familiarity and access Mostly Christians in the United States Mostly Muslims in the Middle East Mostly Buddhists in Asia That's not usually what you see when one of these is a True Religion you generally see this pattern when religion is basically a cultural assumption rather than something that's true contrast this with science there is no american science muslim science and buddhist science science is the same everywhere physics is the same everywhere there is a reason why which this is because science gets to the truth of things and people see that it gets to the truth of things religion In reality, it doesn't, so people choose their religion based on what is immediately available to them or that they were indoctrinated into and then continue throughout their lives assuming that's the standard by which they should measure everything else, so if you were Born in the Middle East, you'd probably be Muslim, not Christian, that's the kind of things you could also ask a Christian and then you would be equally convinced that Islam is true.

Another reason to have an idea about this is that religious belief is negatively correlated with intelligence education and self-esteem and in Christian deception uh Tero and for a long time they cite studies that confirm all of these things basically, the smarter you are , the less likely you are to believe, the more you know, the less likely you should believe and the more self-respect you have, the less likely you are to believe now that relationships are not strong, but they are strong enough to be a warning to someone of that you should really strive to educate yourself to know more.

To become smarter, and you can become smarter because of the way intelligence can be learned, you should strive to do these things and strive to have more respect for yourself so that you can evaluate religion objectively and not pursue religion as a species. of modifying things that you find yourself lacking, on top of all that, our intuition is totally altered and we have confirmed this. This was mentioned the other day. Overactive agency detection is actually hardwired into our brains. We overly attribute agency to things that happen in the world. and I can, there's a great quote there.

I probably won't have time to read it. I wish I had, but I'm going to skip it if you want to know about this, this brain module that identifies the agency, uh, the Christian. The delusion has a great section that talks about many real cognitive science experts in the history of religion who have studied this and it has been confirmed that this is the way the brain normally works, it is the way you have evolved to function. . that you are actually prone to recognize or assume that there is a conscious purpose behind things that happen, so you might catch yourself arguing with your self, for example, that that is the same thing, but you, you have grown beyond it. to the point where you can immediately correct that information, you can argue with your car, but you know that there is not actually a soul operating your car, but people who do not make that connection and who do not begin to realize, oh, yes there is .

There really isn't a soul in my car, that's basically religion, except instead of the car, it's in the universe or whatever. There are several other examples like this. One is that disordered fear-based messages suppress critical reflection and this has been confirmed by psychologists if I'm afraid. If I tell you that you're going to go to hell or that you're going to lose a million dollars or that you're going to lose your house or something, the moment I scare you, your odds are actually going to evaluate what I say next in terms of critical evaluation has dropped substantially and they've actually done control tests where they give information to someone or they present an argument to someone who hasn't been scared and then they present an argument to someone with the fear-based message in front of them. that and people in the fear-based section believe that they believe what they were told at a higher rate than people in the control group, so your brain is actually programmed, say oh oh, this is scary, this It is important information, it is important that you believe it and it is the same basic problem with detecting overactive agency as the cavemen, it made more sense to go in the direction of caution, if you believe too much in things that are dangerous, you will catch all the dangerous things and you might make some mistakes that are not dangerous or not that dangerous, whereas if you don't detect the danger, then something dangerous will catch you, so the chances of you getting killed for not detecting the danger are greater than the chances of being killed if you detect it too much. danger, so we are designed to detect danger excessively, which means that we are extremely manipulable by fear and that is how we have evolved to be that.

It is a basic mistake that our brain makes and you must be careful because it is not only religion that can use this factor to manipulate you, politics, media corporations, everyone can do it, another is time, trust increases faster than evidence and this is strange, uh, you can give, you can take a control group and give it to them. more evidence and start with a claim and give them increasing amounts of evidence and see how their belief increases or you can give someone no new evidence and just let them wait an amount of time and the more they believe in something and the rates of how How sure you are that it's true rates of how sure you are that it's true increase over time even though no new evidence has accumulated and we all behave this way, our brains are actually designed to do this, that the amount of The moment you believe something is wrongly perceived as increasing evidence that it is true, although there is no increased evidence, while increasing evidence actually has a smaller effect, it has an effect that increases the percentage or certainty , but your increase in certainty is actually less impressive than the moment and that's completely irrational and yet that's how the brain works and you have to be on guard against that, another is that rationalization is an autonomous instinct, like was pointed out earlier yesterday, really a good example of your brain making a decision by First you come up with emotional reasons and then you come up with intellectual reasons to believe it Now, if your emotions are well trained, that works reasonably well and if your reason is trained enough to be self-critical, so I better check that to be sure.

You can correct the mistakes this process makes, but you have to learn how to do it. If you don't learn to do it, your brain automatically rationalizes whatever you want to believe, so people who aren't trained as critical thinkers who don't go to the trouble of living a life of self-examination and teaching them how to question themselves and be unsure If their Instinct works all the time, those people will be very likely to be sure that they are true, but they will have all these great intellectual reasons, but none of those reasons were the real reason why they came to the belief and maintain the belief. , another is knee-jerk false generalization and this is one of the things that surprised me when I read the chapters in this book is that if you present someone with, say, three arguments for a position and one of them is weak and the other two are strong and they can refute the weak argument.

People automatically assume they can refute strong arguments, so in effect you add one weak argument to two strong arguments. it actually makes your case worse, it will actually convince them that you're wrong, so it's actually counterproductive to add a weak argument. You should only lead with strong ARGs and not give them a weak one to make, but our brains are actually designed to Let's do this so that if we can detect a problem with the weak argument, we assume that the entire series of arguments presented to us are of the same type and we can rule them all out and it's a way to save time feeling like you don't have to sit there and evaluate every piece of evidence, if one or two don't work for you you can basically use an easy heris and just reject them all and then move on to something else. otherwise it's irrational but it's the way our brains evolved to function and psychologists have shown that that's how our brains work so we need to act against that and protect ourselves against that and another common one is that bias confirmation bias is innate, we're actually designed to have a confirmation bias to look for evidence for things that for claims and beliefs we don't look for evidence against claims and beliefs even though that's the scientific method, by the way, which does Why the scientific method is contrary to common sense is that instead of looking for evidence for a belief, we actually design a test or something that is designed to find evidence against our belief, if there is any, and that is why Science really works so well because it goes against the way we think and it's important to realize that. that and that is another part of skepticism in science and it affects everything we do, like our politics, our political decisions and everything, it's not just religion, but the fact that all these things are inherent, it's a very strong reason that Any Christian or religious person has. be reallyextremely skeptical of their religion and making sure that it passes the same tests that they apply to all other religions because there are all these different easy reasons why they could be deceived in their worldview now there's bad news about all of this um That psychology Trump reasons most of the time and these are T.

These are studies that are also discussed in Christian deception. Face-to-face argument is more persuasive than indirect communications. So, people who come knocking on your door trying to sell you the gospel. they are more effective even if they have weaker arguments than a book or the internet, uh, and this has been proven, it's just the way people work, it doesn't make sense, but there it is, but it's worth pointing this out to people , who are very susceptible to this and you should be aware that you are acceptable and that avoidance behavior is natural if you have this comforting belief that you need or if you believe that you have been convinced that challenging this belief or questioning this belief is dangerous, you will participate into avoidance behavior and that means swallowing lousy arguments pretty easily.

Any argument you can, you can escape with your will and avoid exposure to the opposition, which means not reading our books, uh, not going to atheist conferences, not going to the Avoid forums on the Internet, even those that get defiant and really They go and interact with us, they often run away, and that is avoidance behavior, it is irrational, but that is how people behave and another is, the poison the well fallacy, it really works, it is a proven psychological principle that if If you try to argue that someone is immoral or that there is something wrong with them and that they are a bad person, then all their arguments can be ignored even if they have really strong arguments.

The evidence and their arguments are completely solid, so if you ever wonder why atheists have to be constantly vilified by Christians, they are poisoning the well, they are trying to tell people that atheists are bad people, therefore their arguments have to be bad too and it is a fallacy, it is irrational but it is psychologically innate, these are problems, however, we have this external proof of faith, we can prove that it is a rational way to proceed, you must test your own religious claims and text with the same standards, so why Don't they do it? response that John Lofas had and he actually presented this argument at a conference of evangelical philosophers and they all wrote responses and his chapter in this book is a response to his responses and you can basically divide the responses into two things, two. different ways to respond and one is that we don't have to test our faith by the same standards that we test others and that's it, hypocrisy is a stone that is patently irrational, so it's like an illusion that rears its ugly head fully.

I mean, they might as well just get delusional tattooed right on your forehead if you're going to say that, uh, because that's the Mantra of a delusional person, the second is that our religion passes The Outsider test because we have all this amazing evidence, uh, and then of course that's what the rest of the book shows is not the case, so we have the second leg here. Stimulusability cannot be changed by convincing contrary AR or contrary argument or evidence. They claim they have all this amazing evidence even though they have done it. It has been clearly demonstrated that they do not, or retreat into irrational rejections of rational thought.

Now let's talk about the last one. Sam Harris just published a book called Moral Landscape. It won't be published when I wrote the slides. Was available. It's actually out now um I gave this book an advance look uh it's a pretty good book especially if you're a Sam Harris fan. I recommend it, it's not completely philosophically rigorous, but there's a lot of great science in it, and that's what I do. I recommend it uh and of course I'm the philosopher who defends his position uh I argued it I defended it even before he knew I was arguing for it um and but I defend it using all the philosophical terminology uh so I'm kind of like I said to him: I'm Huxley to your Darwin or the other way around, uh, but one thing he points out in this book and this is what his dissertation and now he has his PhD in cognitive science. talks about his thesis work on the study of belief as an emotion and one thing that he and other psychologists and cognitive scientists have established is that what we call belief, this certainty that something is true, is actually an emotion, it's like , you know, like love or joy or any of these others, it's actually an emotional state and an emotional evaluator in the brain, we've actually located it in the brain, we know where certainty is physically generated in the brain, and we know that it can fail like everyone else. emotions, you can fall in love with someone who really isn't the same person you thought they were, you can be happy for the wrong reasons, etc., another classic example of this, which is a parallel to deception, it's a phobia, now it's a la Phobia is an intense emotion, in this case fear triggered by an inappropriate stimulus, such as flying on a plane, spiders or sour things, does anyone know what the fear of sour things is?

It's a real condition, okay, I'll buy a drink for someone who comes up with it later, it actually has a clinical name. Yes, then there are people who are actually deathly afraid of bitter things. They are terrified of them now. What constitutes a phobia is that there is no rational connection between the emotion or its intensity. The stimuli, uh, flying on a plane, spiders and sour things just aren't that scary, I mean, objectively nor are they that dangerous, fearing them so intensely is irrational and we recognize that, we recognize that a phobia is not a rational belief and It is something that can even be said. it's a kind of delusion, uh, and people often easily recognize that it's a problem that if they have a phobia, they need to be cured and there are ways to cure it.

Delirium is basically like that, a delirium is intense. emotion in this case certainty caused by an inappropriate stimulus strange claims made in an ancient book now, for example, there is no rational connection between the emotion or its intensity and the stimulus the gospel just isn't really that convincing, therefore, be intensely certain that it is true is irrational, therefore, intensely believing that it is irrational, so that gives us the last leg, a deception consists of a certainty held with absolute conviction, so I have established all three, the book gives you everything you need to know to establish each of them.

The Christianity. It is an illusion. I'll give you some good news. Psychology has shown some things we can use. One is that the more so, the more someone is forced to defend a belief over long periods of time, especially but even briefly. The more you are forced to defend a belief, the more you have to think about it and that that process itself can actually, up to a certain measurable percentage, counteract all the other irrational things I was talking about before, so the more The more you are forced to defend a belief, the more you will have to think about it. you force them to think about the weirdness of their religion or the lack of evidence or the challenges they face, the more percentage of Christians start to walk away, it won't convert everyone, but it will increase the number of those who do walk. away and cognitive dissonance is a state of disturbance, not disturbance, but emotional, which is uncomfortable when you are harboring two beliefs that you really want to believe in but they contradict each other or there are two options that you can choose between one or the other.

Otherwise, you can't choose both and they are really important options and it makes it difficult to choose between them. The state of cognitive dissonance feels extremely uncomfortable because it is obvious that your brain needs to make a decision and that is why this emotion of discomfort arises. It's there to push you to go one way or another now when the purpose of course is to make decisions, that's the kind of thing the caveman needed it for, but now Bel, when belief becomes a decision to believe in something or not, cognitive dissonance can actually create problems for you because you could end up with contradictory beliefs and now your only solution is to abandon one or the other belief or find some rationalization that eliminates the contradiction now if you combine and if you hold Both, you force people into cognitive dissonance and one thing that has been shown is that the stronger the contradictions are, the bigger they are, the more impressive or emotionally effective they are or the more striking the options are, the more the idea works. cognitive dissonance, so if you combine and maintain both strong cognitive dissonances by creating arguments about internal contradictions in their particular beliefs and constantly forcing them to defend their beliefs.

If you combine and sustain both, it is an effective Decon converter of a significant enough percentage of any population, let's say even. If it were 10% per generation that gives us victory like 100 years, for example, these are the kinds of things that psychology can help us understand and the purpose of this book is to help you do what you can, it's a whole . toolkit with a lot of information that you can use and it will also educate you on how to build your worldview and be aware of the way your brain makes mistakes and how to overcome them, and it has a lot of very fun things.

There is also criticism of Christians there, well, Christians who maybe even Christians, most Christians think they are crazy. Some of that is there, but it's a good read. I really encourage you to buy it because it is my only source of income right now is selling my books, so if you want to support my work, please buy my books. I might have to buy them back and then I'll be out of money instead of making a profit or something. My wife. He certainly wants me to make money, so please help me with that. I have also written two books that are also helpful for this and address two things you should know when you go out armed among the Christian wolves. one is philosophy and the other is ancient history, which is why I have written two books related to it.

My book on philosophy is sense and goodness without God, which is a complete worldview and you don't have to agree with it, but it gives you an example of how to construct a complete worldview based on scientific evidence and reason instead of, you know, just choosing a peace food or adopting some existing product. I cover epistemology, morality, aesthetics, politics, um and metaphysics, everything and I show how it's all connected and why You also need to have a worldview and that's also based on this, it has bibliographies so it's an extremely useful tool for to go out and answer philosophical questions and address them, and also to construct your own worldview and come up with a well-evidenced coherent view. your own vision of the world, even if you assume that you disagree with the one I have constructed and not with the impossible one.

Faith basically shows you the whole background of the origins of Christianity in terms of, addressing these arguments that Christianity was so impossible that it could only have been successful if Jesus really rose from the dead. There is a particular evangelist called JP Holding who makes this argument. My book is a point BYO reputation for its crazy and false illogical claims about it. but in the process you have a lot of fun watching this guy get torn apart, but you also get educated about ancient sociology, ancient religion, the context of ancient Christianity, ancient Judaism, a lot of things that maybe you didn't know and you arm yourself with that information .

You may find it very useful when dealing with Christian arguments, so both books will help you evangelize for atheism, if that's what you want to do, do it online for example, it's the easiest way for you to do it, uh or leaving. personally in one way or another doing it, or if you're not going to do it yourself, it would be helpful if you could support those of us who do it so we can do the work for you either way, any of those things would be great, but I would especially like to see a lot of people coming out and spreading the meme, so to speak, but when you go out trying to evangelize for atheism, don't do this, don't do that.

I'm asking you to do something else like this um I don't know who this guy is you could probably call him they have to be at least a little crazy and have a lot of free time but hey now imagine if we had people who got paid just to drive this car and answer the phone, you know, that's my talk on Christian deception, if we have time, I don't know if Can I answer questions? Where are we in our time? or no one is paying attention because I haven't asked maybe three questions. Okay, sure, let's do it.

I didn't even think it would arrive on time. Excellent. Okay, so you mentioned it. um, how Christians vilify atheists and stuff like that, and then I heard other speakers say that atheists are at the bottom of the political totem pole, so obviously there's aimage problem that needs to be changed, changed or worked on, um, how could someone you know help? improve that image yeah, I'm not the one asking the question really there are a lot of people who are more experts on that kind of thing um there was a good talk unfortunately it wasn't videotaped by Barry Cosman who does the survey on religion than the giant who does the survey 100,000 random Americans every 10 years and it's a survey that showed we doubled our numbers in the last 20 years where it points out that there are a lot of things that can be done based on what psychologists have learned, um, but I would go online to find what the experts say, like the real experts say about that, um, in general, uh, I don't think the image problem is really the problem, uh, it's like it's not like gay people had to come out and convincing Christians that they were good people per se, they just had to be more to the point that Christians would actually get to know them and realize that they are not these horrible perverted crazy people. people uh and actually that's what has been most effective apart from ridiculing the Christian right which has been very effective um and I have a lot to say about that.

I know people criticize the idea of ​​ridiculing religion, but I think it has its uses. when used correctly, but the other is that Christians are more aware of homosexuals if they realize that there were homosexual people in their family which created cognitive dissonance. You love your child and you have this conflict between your love for your child and your understanding. about how great his character is and the fact that he is gay and then you have your religion saying that is bad, now you have many Christians who then reject their children or reject them, but you have a percentage, always a percentage that solves the contradiction They are in the religious vision and once they have rejected a religious dogma, they are generally on the path.

So over time, it may take them a few years, eventually they will abandon their religion, religion, eventually, um, so that's the kind of thing I can do uh just be out there more um no don't be um there's one thing that I think Phil Plate said don't be an idiot um I don't think there's a problem with being an idiot I mean it's more a matter of not being one I mean not encouraging crime for example basically it shows that you're a good citizen and you don't violent, I mean, frankly, if you show it. you're a good neighbor no matter how restrained you are uh that's the key that's going to change everything but the other thing is just confronting the lies uh I mean if you look at how you could ask how would the Jews improve their image in Nazi Germany?

Would that even be a rational question? So that's the question. You basically have to confront the lies, the things that are saying that Jews are subhuman and you know, Jews. they're not even members of the human species and things like that are blatantly false and this Hitler is an atheist, it's just blatantly false and the more the word and the actual evidence behind it spreads, the more people see that this claim that Hitler is an atheist is actually in doubt, the higher the percentage of people who have been told that he is an atheist, they will actually start to investigate it and when they investigate it they will discover that they have been lied about that Hitler was really a believer and that Nazism It was really a Christian show, uh, and that's how you win.

I mean, it's selecting small percentages over time of recalculated believers, but you have to fight the lies. public, you have to go out and show that atheists are good citizens and we are working on all of these things, so yes, that would be my recommendation, but there are other specific things that could be done that the experts have been talking about as well. The things that religious people do is recognize vulnerable populations or vulnerable people or find people there at a vulnerable time. There are a lot of people who have had an illness or an injury or something like that. and uh, when they go through it, they have this narrative that God wanted me to learn some of this, it's great that you talk about it, you know, having an argument in a pub and I was actually a little upset because we talked about having a argument in a pub uh I heard Randy say you know people might kill themselves if they didn't have their religion and I think that's because we don't offer them a good alternative.

I am a surgeon who works a lot with cancer. surgeries and I often have to tell people that you have cancer, we can't cure it, you're going to die and there are many religious people waiting in our hospital, religious pamphlets that give people a way to deal with that message falsely and I challenge. What I challenge, I challenge you to propose, give us a little help, yes, give us a little help when I have to talk to a family and tell this person that you know you're going to go through bad times, how can I help? they through that give us a little bit of help this is a good example and I'm going to answer this question because I know what you mean uh and this is for you and for anyone who is interested in following this or who has faced the The same problem who works in the medical industry, for example, this is exactly the kind of thing people should write to Tom Flynn of the Council for Secular Humanism and other leaders of the major national organizations that have the resources and networks throughout the country. implement something like a pamphlet or a set of booklets that could be available or real people who are atheist counselors that could be available as volunteers because as lawyers there are tons of pastoral care people hired by hospitals and it's a tough fight yeah Yes, it's a tough fight, but you can do something, and in fact, once you start doing something, you can start generating enough income from donations and such to accumulate over time.

I suggest it be a topic for the next skeptic. That could be yes, but one thing that is relevant is that I totally agree that they need a worldview to replace it because they are basically clinging to a rock in a crazy sea and you have the option to tell them to leave it. go off the Rock and just free float or you can point out that there is another rock that they can quickly jump to and a lot of times people do it on their own, they jump from one religion to another or from one sect to another but we can do that also and that's my book Meaning and Goodness without God is designed to do that it's like it's another rock that you can jump on.

This is a whole other worldview. It answers questions about the meaning of life, how to face death and all those others. things and gives advice for F literature to read about these topics too, so it goes on and on about morality and all the things that people care about, that's why I wrote the book, so that's a use for it, and so that you can point that out, um and hopefully other genius philosophers will grow among you and write other excellent books like that. This question is actually for the audience here. How many of you have actually picked up or purchased a Richard book here on

skepticon

? to all of you to publish those three books, uh, especially those who are a big fan of diving.

I literally couldn't have written Nailed without Richard Carrier. He was there from the beginning. He put me on the right path. He got me out of the way. wrong leads and he said he literally couldn't have that book without Richard and everything he's written has been brilliant, even the books he's just a part of. I would pick up those books and you won't regret it at all. thank you okay oh we have time for another one I think this is the ultimate sense and god it's amazing everyone should read it. I will whip you if you don't.

There's an argument I heard an apologist make because we always say. You know, if you're born here, you're probably a Christian, if you're born in Arabia or whatever, you're probably a Muslim, and this apologist turned it around and said, well, you wouldn't even have that thought if you were born in a Muslim country, you have that because it's part of the culture here is having access to the idea that people M MH I guess it's called theory of knowledge or something, what kind of response would you have to that? Yes, that is exactly one of the responses that was raised against Loftus in the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

He answers very well and completely on a Christian deception in his chapter on this, so buy the book, yes, buy the book, yes, I'm done just in case. The books haven't said it enough.