Matt Dillahunty: "Do They Really Believe That?"

all right I need to turn this recorder on that's the way to get the really long applause is to start in the back of the room and walk walk up very slowly how's everybody doing this is my first time both to CFI headquarters and this area in general so we got to go out to Niagara Falls today I'm thrilled to be here and I wanted well I'm grateful to CFI in general a special thanks to Debbie who not only arranged this but I'm speaking tomorrow to CFI Northeast Ohio and Sunday in Pittsburgh and today's Friday the 13th so I'm glad everybody showed up for that that y'all weren't scared off by a date on a calendar I'm a I'm a professional godless heathen I used to be a software developer and all of my efforts in the secular community in the skeptic community were done in my spare time but now it's it's actually how I make a living and I'm very grateful to community if you're familiar with Kickstarter that's give me a bunch of money and I'll do something there's another effort called patreon which is I'm going to do something whether you give me any money or not and if you'd like to you can donate I started up a patreon service called atheist debates specifically with the goal of teaching people how to be better at having conversations with believers what you know the do's and the don'ts but also going through various arguments and not just here's the Kalam cosmological argument and bla bla bla but simple things like you all just want to sin or look at the trees and and that's been going very well you you can find it I'm not here begging for donations all of the content is available to the world for free and if anybody feels like supporting it that'd be well welcome I also hello I don't tend to repeat talks and so I'm giving three different talks as weekend one at each event and it was fortuitous because I also do about three videos a month so what I thought I'd do is start by doing 20 to 30 minutes on some topic that will bore everybody to tears in a most unprofessional presentation that I will then post to make money later and then take lots of questions so you guys get to hear what's on my mind and then you get to ask me about what's on your mind and I'll be doing that at all three events if you don't like this one you might be able to watch the videos for the other ones as well alright so bear with me for half a second while I do my audio cue the atheist debates patreon project presents do they really believe that now I was a fundamentalist Christian for more than 25 years I got saved at the age of five walked down the aisle at a revival and was active in the church throughout my teen years and I thought that God wanted me to be a preacher and I had parents who felt that way and I know other members of the church did too I wasn't forced to well I was forced to go to church on Sunday mornings because I'm not a morning person but I was there voluntarily the rest of the time Sunday night Monday night visitation Wednesday night services Thursday night youth things I went to summer camps how many people have seen Jesus camp mine wasn't quite that bizarre but I did go to summer camps like Wyndemere her camp Wyndemere down Lake of the Ozarks and when I was 18 and got out of high school I was terrified because I thought God want me to be a preacher I was terrified of public speaking which is incredibly ironic now and I bolted and went in the Navy and I was in the Navy for eight years got out ended up in Austin Texas where I lived now and eventually lost my job lost everything and said ok God if you want me to be a preacher and now you're punishing me for not doing that let's do it and I spent more than a year and a half and study and prayer in the hopes of becoming a preacher now you don't have to go to seminary to be a Baptist preacher you don't even really have to know that much about anything you just have to be able to convince people that God chose you to be their preacher that's how it works so I looked back on my life and I thought about what I believed now it's often easy for me to put on my Christian hat I I've argued both sides I will continue to probably argue both sides I argue the non-religious side most often because I don't want to benefit the religious size but I've run into many people who were lifelong atheists who seem befuddled and and confused they don't really believe that stuff do they they can't possibly believe that for people who weren't raised in a particular religious tradition all of it seems outlandish and strange it's not just the talking snake it's every little aspect of it surely they didn't believe that maybe they're just paying lip service to these ideas and when I look back at what I believed I have to say I don't know how much of it did I actually believe and how much of it was me believing in belief as Dan Dennett would point out that I believe there was value in saying that I believed this I believed there was value in acting as if I believed these things what did I believe and it's getting harder and harder for me to tell the further I am removed from my time spent believing the answer do they really believe this is probably yes and probably no and none of us despite what some of us may do on stage from time to time can actually read minds as far as where as far as we can tell and so it's a mistake for us to pretend as if we can read minds to say oh you don't really believe that no there's no way you can't possibly believe that or to claim that someone's belief is in fact sincere merely because they said so so I can't tell you what's in somebody else's mind or heart if you want to go with the religious language all I can do is take a look at what I believe and what people claim to believe it's important to remember that Christianity and every other religion isn't just one thing the Bible is not just one book it's 66 or more books if you're Catholic that are collected together and there's not just one idea within any of these religions it's a collection which means that there are probably almost certainly people who believe some things and not other thing than any religion I said before that if you want to find out what's wrong with the First Baptist Church you can ask the Second Baptist Church and one more find out what's wrong with Christianity you ask the Jews and Joanne rind out what's wrong with Judaism you can ask a Muslim etc atheists haven't had to do any work we just point around and say yep you're all right that they're all wrong but they don't have good reasons for these things assuming that people believe something is a mistake and it's especially mistake if you're going to enter a conversation with somebody and what you assume about their beliefs is wrong one of the biggest mistakes you can make is saddling a Protestant with Catholic beliefs you you were raised primarily around Catholics and so this idea of an actual transubstantiation where the cracker literally real in reality turns into the body of Christ only Catholics believe that in that sense and so if you go to a Protestant and watch them you know having their version of a Eucharist ceremony and you think ah look at them cannibals if it we didn't think that the Southern Baptist looked at the Catholics and said that was a cult they're the cult of Marion Saints they don't have a real religion they've had this poisoned and polluted by the church and this as a Southern Baptist you I was taught this and we don't have the same ideas well if I can't just assume what you think what should I do hey I could ask you what you think and now while I can't get to what you actually think I can at least address what you claim to think so looking at the Genesis account of the universe that can lead to a lot of different conclusions the more literalist view the more fundamentalist view might lead to a young earth interpretation where the earth is somewhere between six and ten thousand years old and we know that that's not the case and so it seems bizarre and it seems like a point that's very easy to attack but it can also lead to the de-age creationists the people who think that when the Bible says a day it didn't mean a 24-hour day it meant some undefined its timespan that God did this and it took some amount of time that we called a day and it can lead to a mix of those because it's not clear is the Bible is Genesis is this story about our origins is this man's attempt to describe an origin that they believe is is something that comes from a God is it inspired by God is it actually written by a god as I heard one preacher say recently no no the King James Bible actually written by God I don't think that is as accurate I'm pretty sure that you've taken literal just a little too literally is this our best attempt to explain things is it it is it an X is it a demonstration of our ignorance there may not be a single clear or right answer to any of this which is how we end up with over a thousand denominations that identifies Christian and even more once we get outside of Christianity and start looking at Judaism and Islam and that's just the Abrahamic religions there are as many different views about God and what God wants and what God thinks as there are people sitting in pews now while there may not be a single clear right answer and you'll have all sorts of arguments about what is the correct interpretation of this passage there are at least within the Bible some areas that seem to be more obviously intended to be taken at face value than others and if you interpret the Genesis story as a story of Satan creating the world you've got a lot of work to do to convince anybody that you're actually right you're too far field of what it says well there may be room to move around in there and say well you know maybe this wasn't about God actually forming Adam out of some dirt maybe this is ancient man's metaphor for from the earth you know God brought forth and breathe life into Adam some passages thou shalt not kill probably intended to be viewed face-value and so you can use that as an opportunity to say why isn't thou shalt not suffer a witch to live still viewed in the same frame as thou shalt not kill they sound very much the same and they give both give the impression that these are instructions for what you shouldn't do hey you shouldn't kill people unless they're witch that seems kind of straightforward and yet nobody's well almost nobody is running around killing witches at least not in the United States so if we have some passages that are literal or read at face value and others that are metaphoric and everybody can just make up their own justification then what do we know about what people believe I think the only thing that demonstrates is that people believe that they can make this say whatever they want advocates are a particular position literal or otherwise actually need to be made to clearly state what it is they believe and then offer the justification for it oh you think there was a talking snake that's interesting can you tell me why you think that's the case most of the time you're going to find that the answer is because that's what the Bible says or that's what my holy book says or because that's what God has revealed to me but what did I believed about Genesis I don't know I mean I'm not sure because I remember being okay with the idea of evolution even though I probably thought God interacted in the process in some fuzzy way I'm not even sure I had a good understanding anymore of a good understanding of evolution at that time than I did about God's potential interactions with it but what I would take away from Genesis wasn't there was a man and a woman and God created them and there was a talking snake in the six days of creation and this all needs to be taking taken literally I think despite being a fundamentalist Southern Baptist I probably most of the time view Genesis as hey what's the important message to take away from this God created a world we messed it up now we're going to pay for it that's the important message and the facts within Genesis don't make a make much difference to that message whether it's a metaphor for our corruption or it's an actual literal description of what happened doesn't change the take away this is one of the best functions that religions have exploited the you need to have claims that are ambiguous enough that they can be interpreted in different ways so that they are potentially unfalsifiable there's no way to show that they're wrong the more specific you get Thor whole heralds lightning bolts or Zeus does Zeus hurls lightning bolts the more specific you get the more easy it becomes to show that you're probably not correct however God did it God did it that was good enough for me that was a bumper sticker God said it I believe it that's good enough for me or you know God did it that's good enough for me but my view of Genesis was probably muddled and it definitely changed over time and I clearly never had a good reason to believe and yet I was always convinced with each new version of the Genesis story in my head that I did have a good reason to believe what other beliefs from my past seem strange talking snakes that's not good enough let's have talking donkeys that's in there Jonah and the great fish don't call it a whale though correct you so just get used to saying great fish right off the bat it says great fish not a whale and then when you point out that you knew that it was a great fish and you didn't that it wasn't a whale that it was just a great fish you can then ask them what difference does it make if it was a whale or a great fish we're talking about a man who lived inside one for a while if you're going to nitpick over whether or not I call it a whale by the way whale would seem more reasonable I mean if there's got to be room to move around in there hopefully what about the plagues does any of that make sense rivers of blood let's kill the firstborn locusts are these you know real things that happened we know that the Exodus almost certainly didn't happen the archaeological evidence demonstrates that Jews there's nothing to support the idea that Jews were held captive certainly not in the numbers that the Bible supports by the way if you lined everybody up who was supposedly escaping Egypt and had them hand-to-hand they would stretch from where they were supposedly imprisoned all the way to where they ended up which makes you wonder why they had to wander around for 40 years when they could have just formed a line and passed everything down instead of walking mini abreast did a/c actually part and they walked on dry land do you believe that I don't know something like that I believe something like that what about Noah was the whole earth flooded or was it just a local flood well it depends on which Christian you talked to there are plenty who say no it's not a global flood it's just a local flood well if that's the case please explain the rest of your theology because your books purpose for the flood was to purge the entire world of the sinful and save this eighth family this family of eight to be your God's new representatives a drunk who cursed one of his sons to be the offspring of his sons to be slaves of his other sons a drunk guy was the best person God could find to build a boat put all the animals on it and save humanity the world has been pretty crappy I mean I don't a fault Noah for his substance addiction but I mean by and large if that's the absolute best you can do anyway he supposedly successfully built this boat it all makes sense well the Bible doesn't say you had it was kinds it was kinds of animals so maybe there was like one canine kind that Oh spawned all of the dog sentence what you believe is you say evolutions wrong but you're okay with really really fast evolution like we only needed a handful of animals on the boat well you know if God can do the other stuff then he can magic the animals and that's the key once you begin with the idea that there is a God who can do anything it's laughably easy to then accept that there's a talking snake that we've got a bunch of animals on a boat that we flooded the entire earth even though that doesn't seem possible that a few generations after this global flood there's a whole bunch of people who are building a tower you have a civilization that has managed to go from eight people to enough people to build a city who feel the need to build a tower so that they're never parted and they focus all their energy on that by the way I've spoken before about how that's a great story God hates humanists because if you actually read what the text says it doesn't say that they were being punished for their vanity or their attempt to build a tower to heaven it said hey let's build this tower so that we can communicate and so that we can be one community and God basically looked down and said no we can't have that if we allow you to be one community there is nothing you won't be able to achieve so let's mess up your languages and send you scattering to the winds God hates cooperation which is pretty telling because that sounds like a really good idea to me hey let's let's get together as one community let's unite there's nothing we can't accomplish and God says yep you're right there's nothing you can't accomplish so let's put an end to that did I believe that God came down and wrestled people I don't know did I think that you could change the genetic structure of sheep depending on what sticks they were looking at when they were mating or what you happened to brush them with so that you could end up with striped sheep this is one of the things that basically convinced my wife at a very young age that Christianity couldn't possibly be true because she loved genetics and she loves punnett squares she's a microbiologist now and when she read that passage she was like that's it just doesn't work like that what about God wanting to kill Moses and then backing off because they circumcised his newborn kid and threw the foreskin at God's feet or Moses's feet which might have actually been throwing it at Moses as gendell's if you listen to david Fitzgerald I don't know let's get out of the Old Testament what about the loaves and fishes miracles are raising the dead what about this zombie is marching on Jerusalem you know when Jesus is being crucified the dead get up from their graves and march on Jerusalem I mean I haven't actually watched Walking Dead yet I'm looking forward to watching it but I tend to view it as fiction and yet the Bible pretty much has this idea that a bunch of people got out of their graves and marched on Jerusalem as if there wasn't enough crap going wrong right then we got to deal with the Walking Dead I don't know what I believed about that maybe it's just that because God can do anything all of this stuff made sense as soon as you've given yourself over to this idea that magic is real that there are things that can violate the laws of nature and there's one being who's doing it and he's got a plan it all makes sense and even when the miracles go away seemingly they decline in proportion to our ability to investigate them you know like it we start getting video cameras and Sol's and there's a lot fewer miracles then before we had the ability to record things before we had good scientific investigation there were miracles everywhere and now all of a sudden you know you've got Joe Nickell trying to do debunk the Shroud of Turin seemingly every other week or so because somebody has done it looked at it again we've looked at it again and yes now we're now we're sure it's blood okay what can you tell us about that blood oh well now we're sure that it's the blood and so the images of someone who is clearly male but the blood would lead us to conclude parthenogenesis also wait just so Jesus was female no no that's the miracle part oh oh that's the miracle part okay there is a time and a place for mockery and ridicule and not everybody accepts that I think that ridiculous ideas are by definition deserving of ridicule but there's a difference between ridiculing ideas and ridiculing people who hold those ideas I can't tell you what's actually in somebody's mind I have met people who have claimed to believe almost any absurd thing in the Bible or out of the Bible and I can't read their minds and there are many cases where I understand the temptation to say oh well you know you're never going to change their mind there's no amount of evidence you can throw at them that's going to change their mind there may be people for whom that's correct but there are certainly so people for whom that's not correct and I don't know how to tell the difference between those people until I actually talked to them and that's why I spend time talking to them we're talking about people here and if you don't care about what people believe or you don't think you have any hope of changing their mind then I don't know why you would feel the need to engage but I'm an atheist because I'm a skeptic but I talk about this stuff because I'm a humanist because I care about what kind of world we live in because people's beliefs whether they actually believe it or they are just acting as if they believe it those beliefs inform actions and those actions have consequences for them and for the rest of us as well so when we're engaging on these topics can we just point out the flaws can we just say you know the earth can't be ten thousand years old and here's the evidence for it absolutely you can do that how effective is it I don't know sometimes it's probably really effective I had conversations with people who don't seem to understand what they actually believe can't express it very clearly and when asked to give the reason why well you don't get much and in those cases if you can provide actual evidence if you can actually falsify their position by all means do it but it may may not be all you need to do because you don't know if they consider their holy book to be the literal word of God or the inspired Word of God how perfect do they consider the Bible not everybody thinks the Bible is perfect I remember Ray Comfort called into the show one time and I challenged him on the slavery issue and he said well I don't believe everything in the Bible I had made the assumption that Ray who was making incredibly horrible arguments and who seemed to be like every other biblical literalist that I'd ever met not that any of them are true literalist I I just assumed that if it was in the Bible he was willing to defend it and then he comes out of the blue and says well you know not not everything in the Bible I don't believe everything in the Bible which is great to know and I wish I had known before I brought that up because that allows me to ask the question hey ray how do you tell which parts of the Bible you should believe in which part she shouldn't that's that's the best question you can ask it's the reason there are over a thousand denominations that all identify as Christian and all point to the Bible you can't assume that because Joe is a Christian that Joe believes everything every other Christian you've met believes yes they probably believe in a God believe it or not I've run across some people who identify as Christian who don't believe that a God exists I have met ministers at Methodist churches who are open atheists I'm still working on that one trying to sort through how that works but they probably believe in God they probably view Jesus as part of or somehow connected to God and they probably believe that we are sinners in need of salvation but that doesn't mean that they buy into these sinners in the hands of an angry god mentality there was someone who called the show last week who seemed confused as to why I would object to the Bible and it came out very quickly that he hadn't actually read the Bible oh well he'd read parts of it great I've read the whole thing several times and studied it quite a bit and I can fully understand how if you only read parts of it you could have warm fuzzy feelings I don't understand what your real justification is for believing other than this feels good or people around me believe and so we started going through we talked about well you know if you think the Bible is a good moral book why does it support slavery Bible doesn't support yes it does Exodus 21 you should go read it and he added that to his homework list of things to go read we talked about how the Bible forces a rapist to marry his rape victim and pay the shekels and that he can't ever divorce her and he was dumbfounded that this was in the Bible and I asked him I'm like how can you possibly be advocating for the Bible as a good book when you haven't read it well it's not just one book in 66 books yeah it is please point to the ones that you think are good and if I agree with you that the content is good then we're in agreement keep the good wherever you find it there are good things in the Bible there are good things in almost any book I I don't know for sure but I would imagine there's probably a sentence in meine Kampf I agree with maybe what Christianity is today is not what it was 50 years ago or a hundred years ago or 500 years ago it's not what it was 2,000 years ago and it's more wide-ranging in the collection of beliefs that you're going to find with anybody who interact with there are people out there who believe almost anything it seems and everybody in this room is one of those people I don't believe mean that we are all extremely gullible so that everything that we could we could potentially believe everything that we hear it's just that there's none of us who are perfectly rational we're all going to have some belief that we got wrong that we hold for bad reasons and recognizing that we do this and that you know hey this belief might not be as bad as this other belief it's a good thing but it's also deceptive because when you say oh the thing that I believe that might be wrong doesn't really hurt anybody there's still a thought process in your brain that led you to that conclusion and you have no good reason to think that that thought process wouldn't be used to assess other claims to lead you to other false beliefs using critical thinking applying the tools of critical thinking and using skepticism to evaluate claims it's a tool set and it's a full-time job when I gave up my beliefs when I couldn't continue to point to the Bible as the source for why I believed things I had to go through and evaluate it and say okay what do I believe now and why that's a lot of work it's much easier just to take what somebody says to you and keep going and the weird thing is most of the persons that you run across and perhaps believers in other religions as well that I'll talk about Christianity as it's you know what I'm most familiar with and what's prevalent here we're talking about what's in the Bible most of them don't know very much about what they believe they don't know much about their holy book they don't know very much about the origins of their religion they know what they've been taught they know what felt right to them they know what worked in the church that they were in and they have some vague warm fuzzy feeling about it they most of them haven't actually read the book at least not all of it because what soon as everybody gets to the begats it's big over why would I need to keep reading after that why is that even included in there that's just bizarre this is if my religion is telling me that this is a book that's supposed to be used as a manuscript a guide to help you with your everyday life why do I care who sired who that's just bizarre but I actually met somebody who claimed they had all of them memorized like they have every verse memorized and I said even the big ATS and yes even to the GATS cool cool when they Bible trivia games you're the guy I want on my team they bought into sermons they bought into the feelings they bought into the culture and they just assumed that so many people couldn't possibly be so wrong for so long and yet we know that that is in fact false they can have been wrong for that long they've accepted what the priest the preacher or the pastor is said and almost no Christian Church is actually about the Bible most Christian churches aren't even about Jesus the core of Christian churches now primarily comes from what Paul had to say and then we take the bits and pieces from Jesus that are convenient to the broader message that Paul expounded upon churches today that identify even as Bible churches aren't so much about the actual Bible as interpreting the Bible I wish they would start with the verse that says let God be true and every man a liar because that demonstrates that all of these interpretations and all of these views and doctrines about the Bible can't be correct and that we can't tell which of them might possibly be correct until some God comes down and clears it up for us which is why so many of them claim that God has cleared it up for them and they all disagree they'll tell common stories and they'll talk about a need for salvation in their church but much of the time is spent trying to convince people that this ancient of books is somehow relevant to their everyday life because without that it becomes what it actually is mythology as soon as it loses that communal connection as soon as it loses that relevance that this passage tells me something significant about Who I am that I can put to use today that's when it is relegated to the to the pile of Mythology that we have so how do we reach people that may not be everybody's goal by the way have whatever goal you want if you want to argue with people because you want to show how much more you know about their religion than they do okay I don't know that you're doing that much good but you can have fun doing that I do what I do because I care about what kind of world we live in it's derived from my humanism as I mentioned so when I talk about how to reach people one of the quest tools is to ask them what they believe in Y and the Y is the most important part and when I ask questions and I'm trying to engage with someone I'm actually interested in their answer I'm not just waiting for my turn to speak I'm not just oh they said Genesis let me boot up the map memory on Genesis so that I can point to oh you believe in talking snakes I'm actually I want to know what do you believe in why now I may lose my patience very quickly because it may become clear that I'm talking to someone who doesn't really know and the best thing I can do at that point is say look you don't seem to really have a good understanding of what you believe or why why don't you go think about it and get back to me now this is the thing I've been people have said oh you're just like the fundamentalists that you argue against no I don't make outgoing calls on the show I don't go door to door I engage with the people who want to engage and this brings up another distinction when you're interacting with people things are fundamentally different when you're interacting one-on-one with someone than when you have an audience now I prefer an audience I'd love to reach as many people as possible and when I'm having a public debate at a university or when I'm on the phone with someone at the TV show I'm not necessarily trying to can since them I'm trying to convince the people that are watching because we know enough about people watching that if the person they agree with is embarrassing themselves if they are looking foolish if they are doing a poor job of defending it the person who shares those beliefs feels that pain but they don't suffer from the disadvantage of having been the actual one who was public embarrassed and that allows them the opportunity if they want to take it to rethink why they believe hey how would I buy how would I have argued this better have a goal and having the conversation realize that you're not going to change anybody's mind right away most of the time have if your goal is something that is worthy that'll be obvious I can tell you if you come up against a believer and like I was saying earlier if you use you know Catholic ideas when you're arguing with a Protestant they get to disregard everything you say because you don't know what you're talking about they shouldn't because you can be wrong about that one thing and right about everything else but they get to do that that's the defense mechanisms that we all have and religions exploit is that guy doesn't know what he's talking about oh she just wants to sin she just wants to do this he just wants to do that they have some motive and we use that and religious people use it as an excuse to ignore the substantive things that they've been challenged on now the guy who called in last week who decided to go to his homework I have no idea what will happen to him I don't know what was actually in his mind and he had a difficult time expressing it I'd be happy to take another call from him I'd love to hear what happened I'd like to hear hey I went off and researched this Bible thing and and here's the answer that you seem to have overlooked and why I still believe because that allows us to move the conversation on a step further because Christian apologetics exists to explain away or attempt to explain away all of the objections that we launched on a regular basis to their doctrines to the theology and to what's in their holy book but in the end what he actually believed wasn't as important as why he believed it and when the foundations for why you believe something those beliefs go away you can struggle and you can watch people actually do this I love watching people thinking I love making people think which is why I love doing the show you can hear those pauses and I can almost picture a work crew in somebody's head saying oh my gosh the bridge is about to fall let's start propping it up here what can we use grab anything you've got let's throw everything at it and try and keep this thing stable and I just kind of sit back and good that's about to fall over you don't have enough graces to put that up and when the bridge crumbles there are people who are going to sit there and say nope the bridge is still there yes the Emperor definitely has clothes on and maybe you can't reach them but maybe somebody else can because I have this idea that for example the first time you hear an idea expressed that seems foreign and strange you're probably if you've if you're skeptical if you've been burned by bad ideas in the past probably have a wall up nope that idea that's too weird too strange and then the second time you hear it it's like wow that that's weird because this other person had said that thing maybe maybe there's something there but no no and then the third time you hear it now of a sudden you're spotting a trend it takes three to get us to a trend that's why three on a match is considered bad luck first one hey there was something over there second one I think it's right about there the third one yep boom you're dead as a war example which might have flown over some people's heads should have been more clear but if you're going to interact with one person please I hope you're doing it because you care about what they think and you're free to say you know what I'm not trying to insult you but when I Sask you if you really believe this it's because in my head it just seems so outlandish and when I've heard people when I've heard Christians in the past talk about feeding the masses with five loaves and fishes I just always assumed that they kind of went yeah you know will we believe that but you actually believe it and I'd like to know why what what is it about it because you can't read minds but what's in people mine's matters so the only way to get to it is to talk to them and ask questions and if your goal is to just make them look foolish well congratulations there's plenty of space for you on the Internet happens all the time all the religious ARDS that language drives me nuts now yes some people really do believe all the things that we find ridiculous and there are people in this room who believe things that somebody else in this room finds ridiculous that is something that I keep in my mind when I'm hearing from the guy who's had visitations from aliens for most of his life as I heard just a few weeks ago on the show I keep that in mind when somebody is talking about how Jesus help them find their car keys or how they cure their mom's cancer or how they just feel it because beliefs matter but I don't have access to them all I have access to is what people say they believe and if I can show that what they say they believe is in conflict with what they do if they're acting in a way that is clearly in conflict with what they say they believe that causes a disconnect in their head that allows them to go back and say wait a minute do I actually believe this or am I just kind of acting as if I believe it or or maybe I wasn't even acting as if I believe it maybe I just said I believed it I wasn't really sure about it that's the kind of conversations that we saw last week to keep using that one example so why not use the Socratic method which i think is the best tool we have you're never going to learn anything more strongly than when you learned it yourself when you have that Eureka aha moment yourself and so the Socratic method of asking people questions ultimately leading them towards something it's not dishonest it's not a trick there are people who when they call in a show you're trying you're asking me trick questions no I'm just exposing the problems with the answers that you began with that's not a trick asking you to justify what you believe is not a trick and everybody isn't going to be reachable certainly not on the first go but if you actually point out people where they haven't adequately defended their belief when you demonstrate that since they believe in you don't they have a burden of proof for the positive claim that they're making they have the obligation to try to convince you they should have the obligation to try to convince anyone and we do this to get them to realize errors but also with the recognition that we could be wrong and if they do in fact have a good reason for their belief and we should accept that - and I try to do as much of this as I can from the standpoint of humanism demonstrating that I don't think that somebody's stupid that my IQ didn't go up when I stopped believing I just had different access to different information and viewed it from a different angle that while I may believe that their particular views are stupid that I don't necessarily think they're stupid I'm not trying to attack their character it's difficult to do because these things go to the core people's identity just merely my existence the fact that there's someone out there who does not believe in Jesus will freak some people out and there's no reason that it should because the Bible explicitly tells them that they're supposed to be out there talking to the people who don't believe and yet they're freaked out by the fact that I exist probably more freaked out by the fact that I won't shut up about it this idea of going into these conversations and saying you know I just really find it difficult to believe that you believe what you say you believe that's okay that's not oh my gosh you're so stupid that's wrong the earth is not ten thousand years old here's a bunch of scientific information there are people that can be reached by that in the same way that there are people who give up their belief in Santa Claus because they went out and explored on their own and there are others who were ridiculed on the bus on the way to school oh you still believe that multiple methods can work but when I talk to people both former believers but in many cases lifelong atheists they just don't seem to be able to grasp the concept that people actually believe this stuff come on Matt yeah you were a believer but you didn't really believe yeah a lot of it I pretty much did I was betting my life on it even though I was making a bad bet even though I didn't have good reason I would have told you I had good reasons I would probably argued with you and debated with you oh but you didn't really believe like a talking snake I mean you won't you have snakes they don't talk yes but that I don't have a talking snake I don't have a snake that may have been taken over by the spirit of a supernatural being well how do you think why do you think that's real because God can do anything and that's the key whether they believe it whether I believed it whether we just believed in believing it there was a foundational belief that there was a guy and it's almost always a guy who exists outside of space and time who has a plan and can do anything and as soon as you accept that everything is possible talking snakes or nothing so don't focus as much on the belief even though they're important focus more on the why and do it by focusing on the person that you're talking to and from my experience and others may differ that's probably the most effective way of getting people to realize that their story that their feelings are not at all different from all the members of the clergy project who have lost their religious views all the members of the secular community who were once religious which is most people and that maybe it's okay for them to give up those beliefs as well getting the permission and being forced to defend your position might be all it takes to creating a world full of secular people who reject unfounded religious dogma Thanks

Channel: Center for Inquiry

Views: 180,333

Rating: 4.8311777 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Dillahunty, belief, skepticism, humanism, atheist, atheism, Do They Really Believe That, The Atheist Experience, Center For Inquiry, CFI, Skeptics, skeptic, Science (Field Of Study), pseudoscience, pseudoscience vs science, Reasonable Talk, debunking religion, creationism, creationism in education, debunking christianity, Religion

Id: o0UScVc4Rpw

Length: 44min 44sec (2684 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/izumo13]

I was lucky enough to be there in person for this talk. It was great to hear him speak, and then the q&a afterwards. A bunch of us even got to hang out with him over dinner and drinks afterwards where he showed off some of his card and rubber band tricks. I'm still trying to figure out how most of those worked. Awesome guy!

[u/Elron_de_Sade]

Matt sure is a great speaker. Forty-five well spent minutes.