A Manual for Creating Atheists

by Peter Boghossian

  To prevent doxastic closure it’s also important to read the work of noted apologists. The only two I’d suggest are Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, though I’d urge you not to buy their books; their projects don’t need your support. If you must buy one of their books buy it used and support a local bookstore, this way the author doesn’t receive any royalties.

  Finally, the “Dig Deeper” section at the end of most chapters has additional recommended reading.

  5. Contribute.

  Not everyone can become a Street Epistemologist. Some people don’t have the disposition. Others don’t have the inclination. Others still are held back by social fears or interpersonal anxieties.

  If you don’t become a Street Epistemologist, you can still make a contribution to reason and rationality. Find the unique contribution you can make and do it: if you’re an attorney volunteer your legal services; if you’re a sound technician volunteer on public access shows or help secular groups with their podcasts; if you like to entertain then volunteer your house for potlucks in support of local freethinker groups; if you enjoy writing then write editorials that identify and expose instances of unreason (print publications are starved for thoughtful letters); if you’re an organizer then create groups to raise money or help established, reputable organizations like the Center for Inquiry or the James Randi Educational Foundation; if you’re more of a street activist, then picket events designed to spread faith;6 if you don’t have the time or the inclination to engage, then make a financial contribution to one of the secular legal organizations noted in the “Dig Deeper” section at the end of this chapter.

  Be active. Get involved. Volunteer. Vote for candidates who support reason. Use your individual skill set and your voice to promote reason and combat unreason. Make a contribution.

  6. Experiment and publicize.

  Develop and test your own strategies to fight the faith virus. Consider publicizing your particular contribution in an appropriate medium: books, magazines, YouTube, fiction, documentaries, plays, editorials and letters to the editor, songs, art works, etc. Allow others to learn from your successes and from your failures. It’s much better to act and fail spectacularly than to have never acted at all.

  7. Form academic-community partnerships.

  The high school and university systems should be used as reason and rationality incubation chambers. One of the ways to do this is through the formation of academic-community partnerships. Individual teachers, professors, and entire departments can reach out to organizations—like the Skeptics Society, the James Randi Educational Foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, the Center for Inquiry, the Secular Student Alliance, Project Reason, or other well-respected organizations—and ask how they could be of use in the promotion of reason, rationality, critical thinking, and the public understanding of science.

  These partnerships can take many forms: online publishing of student papers on select topics, commenting on curricula, contributing research for journal articles, teaching critical thinking curriculum in the local school system, reviewing journal articles, and doing whatever else a community partner would find helpful. The purpose of the partnership is to help like-minded, nonprofit organizations extend their reach and better discharge their mandate to promote reason, rationality, and the public understanding of science.7 Additionally, partnerships provide educators with an opportunity to promote reason, translate theory into practice, help their communities, and find and nurture students who want to pursue further study.

  8. Treat faith as a public health crisis.

  “Biological virus strategies bear a remarkable resemblance to methods of religious propagation. Religious conversion seems to affect personality. In the viral paradigm, the God virus infects and takes over the critical thinking capacity of the individual with respect to his or her own religion, much as rabies affects specific parts of the central nervous system. A simple thought experiment reveals how the God virus works to dull critical thinking. The God virus infects an individual and then inoculates against other viruses. Vectors in biology carry a parasite, virus or pathogen from one reservoir to another. Religious vectors act in similar ways. Priests, imams, ministers, etc., carry the virus and infect new people. The virus carefully directs resources toward it and creates taboos against giving to competing viruses. Sometimes vectors fail. The expense of developing a vector makes it imperative to protect it even in failure as in the case of priest pedophilia. Mutations are constantly produced. Occasionally one breaks out, as in the case of Martin Luther, to infect vulnerable people and cultures.”

  —Darrel Ray, The God Virus (2009, p. 32)

  There are groups, institutions, and organizations actively promoting the spread of unreliable epistemologies (e.g., Alliance Defending Freedom, Alliance Defense Fund, American Center for Law and Justice, Christian Legal Society, Christian Law Association, National Legal Foundation, mega- and micro-churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc.). We need to view the spread of these unreliable processes, along with the institutions that promote them, as a public health crisis. The purpose of this section is not to explain what policies would look like or to describe particular interventions. Rather, I want to add my voice to the growing number of people who argue that we must reconceptualize faith as a virus of the mind (Brodie, 1996), and treat faith like other epidemiological crises: contain and eradicate.8

  Just as society has established mechanisms to deal with contagions, pathogens, and infectious diseases that affect our water, air, and food supply (with objectives like ensuring that the commons are free of toxins and preventing the spread of diseases), there’s also an urgent need for large-scale interventions in educational systems, houses of worship, and other institutions that promote failed epistemologies.

  However, there are serious ethical, constitutional, and free speech issues that prevent the development and institutionalization of largescale epistemological interventions. Given these constitutional and basic rights issues, instead of epistemologically sanitizing organizations, interventions need to be designed that counter the spread of these virulent epistemologies (not the conclusions that follow from these epistemologies, but the epistemologies themselves). Such interventions should promote, laud, and even glamorize reliable epistemologies.9 That is, an inoculation and containment strategy should promote the value of believing on the basis of evidence. The specifics of how this could be accomplished are subjects for further study.

  I want to be clear that I’m not advocating making faith illegal, in the same way racism cannot be made illegal. I advocate conceptualizing the faith problem from a public health perspective and designing interventions based upon this model.

  9. Financially cripple purveyors of faulty epistemologies.

  A key containment protocol is to financially cripple any institution that propagates a faulty epistemology, starting with the most egregious perpetrators: religious institutions.10 Ultimately, the tax-exempt status of religious organizations must be removed, particularly those exemptions that are not granted to other nonprofits. (In the United States this is probably at least twelve years away.)11

  Once these organizations are financially compromised, their reach and power will be greatly diminished. Here are two of the better and more politically viable, medium-term (five to ten years) goals to financially cripple faith-based institutions:

  Eliminate the “exemption from federal taxes for most of the money they [clergy] spend on housing, which typically represents roughly a third of their compensation” (Henriques, 2006a). It must be noted that this same tax exemption “is not available to the staff at secular nonprofit organizations whose scale and charitable aims compare to those of religious ministries like Pastor Warren’s church, or to poorly paid inner-city teachers and day care workers who also serve their communities… . Nor do people at secular nonprofit organizations engaged in humanitarian work” (Henriques, 2006a).

  Revoke pension law exemptions granted to religious instit
utions. “Religious employers are exempt from Erisa, the federal pension law that establishes disclosure requirements and conflict-of-interest restrictions for employee pension plans. That exemption has given rise to several cases in which workers at religious hospitals found that their pensions had vanished because of practices that would not have been allowed under Erisa’s rules” (Henriques, 2009b).

  Both of these measures would deal a serious financial blow to religious institutions, and also restrict their ability to proselytize.

  Religious institutions will not easily give up their positions of favoritism, but as faith is devalued, time and the law will demand each church, mosque, temple, and synagogue pay taxes. Among those leading the way toward this fundamental change is the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF): http://ffrf.org/. Lending your support to the FFRF will help to facilitate needed legal changes to contain the faith contagion.12

  10. Create skeptical (atheist) children.

  “Virtually all religions rely upon early childhood indoctrination as the prime infection strategy.”

  —Darrel Ray, The God Virus (2009, p. 23)

  “My son told me that in his rebellious phase he’s going to become a fundamentalist.”

  —Peter Boghossian

  Much has been written about how to raise a child Catholic or Muslim or Mormon or Baha’i. There is no scholarship on how to raise a child to not pretend to know things she doesn’t know. In this section I offer my own ideas: drawing from opinions and personal correspondence with notable atheists, reverse engineering literature on raising children in a faith tradition, and broadly surveying research relating to brain development and the process of belief formation in children.

  It may seem odd: raise a child so she doesn’t hold preposterous metaphysical beliefs. Strange indeed, but also vital. In a society in which the overwhelming majority of people are faithful, and in a culture that frowns upon atheism and even condemns atheists, how is growing up with a skeptical mind-set accomplished?

  Let me start by saying that creating religiously skeptical children is probably quite simple. The fact that children tend to track their parents’ religious beliefs is good news for atheist readers (Acock & Bengston, 1980; Erikson, 1992, pp. 141–148; Hoge, Petrillo, & Smith, 1982; Iannaccone 1990, p. 309; Myers, 1996). Many children from religious households abandon and do not regain their faith. And, if trends of belief in God continue to plummet, both social acceptance of atheism and the number of atheists will continue to rise (“The Global Religious Landscape,” 2012). This bodes well for our children and for the future.

  There are no formulas guaranteed to create an atheist child, but raising a child as a critical thinker, a skeptic, a humanist, or a free thinker will most likely immunize her against delusional thinking and pretending to know things she doesn’t know. While these are all related and interdependent, teaching children the importance of adopting a skeptical mind-set, and how to think skeptically, may be the most important of all educational values (Luce, Callanan, & Smilovic, 2013). Atheism is skepticism applied to a specific extraordinary claim, and children should be taught to apply skepticism to claims in general—not just faith and extraordinary metaphysical claims.

  It’s more important to develop the attitudinal disposition to be skeptical than it is to develop the critical thinking skill set. If you can cultivate a skeptical disposition, then it will be more likely your children will not succumb to the faith virus. Anyone can develop a critical thinking skill set—it’s like learning to ride a bike—but without the attitudinal component one will not act upon the results of the inquiry—one will never actually ride a bike. In other words, if you brought the skill set to bear on an issue, but were unwilling to change your mind based upon the results, then there was no purpose of inquiring in the first place. It was a cognitive kangaroo court.

  These dispositions and skill sets are primarily achieved through modeling. There’s interesting educational, correctional, and psychological literature on pro-social modeling; that is, act the way you want others—particularly your children—to act. For example, if you want your children to read, don’t read to them but have them watch you read. If you don’t want your children to pretend to know things they don’t know, don’t pretend to know things you don’t know. Model the behavior you want them to adopt.

  Also, be careful about being too strident. Speak bluntly but model doxastic openness: tell your children you’re always willing to listen to the evidence for specific faith claims (faith healing, people speaking in dead languages they’ve never heard, reincarnation, etc.). Then genuinely listen. Help them evaluate claims by focusing on the process used to come to conclusions. For example, focus less on reincarnation and more on how one knows people are reincarnated. For example, is the process used to select the successor to the Dalai Lama one which can be relied upon?

  Exposure to different faith traditions may also act as a prophylactic against unwarranted belief. Making something “an other,” mysterious or wondrous, may push children toward the very things you want them to avoid. Instead, read different religious texts with your children, attend religious services with them, be eager and ready to help them answer any questions they may have (and not just about faith and religion). Don’t make religion a forbidden fruit: acknowledge and read religious literature with your children, model the behavior you want them to emulate, genuinely listen, and gently encourage mutual examination of each other’s reasoning processes.

  11. Remove religious exemption for delusion from the DSM.

  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), is the single most important text used by clinicians. It is the diagnostic rulebook.13 Currently, the DSM grants religious delusions an exemption from classification as a mental illness. The following is the DSM-IV’s definition of delusion:

  “A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility. Delusional conviction occurs on a continuum and can sometimes be inferred from an individual’s behavior. It is often difficult to distinguish between a delusion and an overvalued idea (in which case the individual has an unreasonable belief or idea but does not hold it as firmly as is the case with a delusion)” (italics mine) (2000, p. 765).

  It is crucial that the religious exemption for delusion be removed from the DSM. Once religious delusions are integrated into the DSM, entirely new categories of research and treatment into the problem of faith can be created. These will include removal of existing ethical barriers, changing treatments covered by insurance, including faith-based special education programs in the schools, helping children who have been indoctrinated into a faith tradition, and legitimizing interventions designed to rid subjects of the faith affliction.

  Removing the exemption that classifies a phenomenon as an officially recognized psychiatric disorder legitimizes research designed to cure the disorder. These classifications also enable researchers to assess their treatments and to continue to build upon what works. Of course there will be institutional and social barriers discouraging research into controversial areas, but with this one change the major barrier—receiving approval from the IRB to disabuse human subjects of faith—would be instantly overcome.

  There is perhaps no greater contribution one could make to contain and perhaps even cure faith than removing the exemption that prohibits classifying religious delusions as mental illness. The removal of religious exemptions from the DSM would enable academicians and clinicians to bring considerable resources to bear on the problem of treating faith, as well as on the ethical issues surrounding faith-
based interventions. In the long term, once these treatments and this body of research is refined, results could then be used to inform public health policies designed to contain and ultimately eradicate faith.

  INTERVENTION

  On October 25, 2011, at Portland State University, I delivered a lecture for Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Society. Sigma Xi is an organization comprised of professional researchers and academicians. This particular meeting was an interdisciplinary event attended by approximately two hundred science leaders throughout Oregon.

  The original title of my lecture was, “Jesus, Muhammad, the Tooth Fairy, and Other Evil Creatures.” However, the organizer of the event politely asked me to tone down the title. I submitted the following, which was accepted without question: “Jesus, Mother Teresa, the Tooth Fairy, and Other Evil Creatures.”

  After my talk, during the question and answer, an academician in the audience (AA) raised his hand.

  AA: I’m very offended by what you’ve said here tonight.

  (The room goes silent.)

  PB: Your offense means nothing to me. If you have arguments or evidence I’d like to hear what you have to say. You saying that you’re offended carries no weight. Nor should it.

  AA: My wife was healed by Jesus Christ.

  PB: How do you know that? People get sick and recover from illnesses all the time. What would make you think that your god had anything to do with it?

  AA: She was suffering from an incurable illness.

  This is an example of Kazez’s “bullying ideas off of the table.” AA wanted to shut down the discourse, presumably because he didn’t think these issues should be discussed in public. And, in fact, not only did the room go silent, but I also saw virtually everybody hunch down as if they were trying to disappear.