Comment by Jason Wagner on March 5, 2010 at 8:25am

If all she is doing is covering her ears and saying "La La La I can't hear you" then you are wasting your breath. You can't force people to be rational. Besides, your family is such that you are hiding your atheism so I have to imagine you don't really have an open forum of communication and acceptance. The only thing I might suggest is pick her up a book by Dawkins or Hitchens and ask her to read it for you, that it would really mean a lot if she would.

Just remember, you can't get blood from a turnip.

Comment by Jānis Ķimsis on March 5, 2010 at 8:27am

If your dad was with you on the "know/believe" issue, why are you afraid to tell him about your atheism?

Comment by wisp on March 5, 2010 at 8:59am

I do not wish to tell my dad about my atheism because, to make a very long story short, he has a degenerative nerve disease that is sapping his strength more and more every day, and he is depressed enough as it is. He seems to have been turning to his faith to try to find comfort, and I do not want to potentially make him feel even worse. The extent of his negativity could be unwanted pity for me, but if he were to end up losing his faith I honestly fear that he would give up on trying anymore.

My mom and I do communicate openly with each other and we make a great effort to accept each other's beliefs. Dawkins or Hitchens would most definitely be too over the top; I would never recommend them to her unless she made some serious steps towards being willing to question her faith. I don't want to deconvert the poor woman; I only want her to look at her beliefs in a healthier way.

Comment by Matthew on March 5, 2010 at 10:08am

In cases like these I like to use the ~Invisible Unicorn~ argument. I don't know where I got this, but in a nutshell it goes like this....
Tell your mom that you KNOW there is an invisible unicorn in the room. Does she believe you? Why not? Because it is unprovable. Then ask how her unfounded and unprovable beliefs are any different than the Invisible Unicorn.

I have used this several times and it always causes the believer all sorts of trouble. Like any debate like this, it doesn't cause them to change their mind on the spot. However, it at least gets them thinking.

Comment by wisp on March 5, 2010 at 10:28am

Haha... my mom loves unicorns, incidentally. That might be a nice, non-aggressive way to get my point across.

Comment by Mario Rodgers on March 5, 2010 at 11:54am

The Greeks KNEW the gods would help them against the Trojans. A lot of Muslims KNOW that they're going to heaven but not Christians.

Comment by Shine on March 5, 2010 at 12:18pm

The inability of most people to distinguish between belief and knowledge drives me insane. I have written a lot about it, because I really cannot see how the two are so difficult to separate. Like the cousin example, I often hear other hypothetical situation of Chinese rain used; because you cannot physically sense the presence of rainfall in China firsthand, someone will argue that you never know that it is raining in China but instead only believe what someone else in China may have told you. (This assumes that one is located somewhere in the western hemisphere.)

Essentially, the entire premise is to label everything we learn second-hand and not through direct sensory experience as a belief, thereby normalizing religious beliefs by including them with everyday beliefs. Of course, the critical flaw in the parallel is that while your cousin and the Chinese rain are potentially observable, the subject matter of religious beliefs are fundamentally unobservable and therefore unfalsifiable or unprovable.

I think that it is this potential to be observed that separates religious beliefs from everyday beliefs, and it really boils down to the difference between faith and trust. Religious beliefs about unobservable events are based solely upon faith, whereas everyday beliefs about observable--yet not directly observed--events are based upon trust. Faith is necessarily blind and recoils from knowledge, whereas trust is usually rooted in past experience and welcomes verification from truth.

Wisp, I understand why you do not want to tell your dad specifically about your atheism. My boyfriend also has a degenerative neurological disease, Friedreich's ataxia. Fortunately, he was an atheist long before me, back when I was floundering around in the mysticism of agnostic ambiguity. However, most of his family are devoutly Christian, and I know that many of them are emotionally dependent upon the idea of a heaven where he will be freed from his disease. Although both him and I accept the hard truth of reality as best we can, we still respect the reliance of his family upon theism. It is a situation that makes me protest against extremely pro-active atheism; while I oppose the supremacy of religion, I recognize that there are many people in pain who rely upon the comforts of delusion.

Comment by Mario Rodgers on March 5, 2010 at 12:43pm

That's a great post, Shine.

Comment by Matthew on March 5, 2010 at 5:38pm

Comment by M on March 5, 2010 at 8:02pm

So, I read an American Atheist article somewhere, sometime, that kind of touched on what you're talking about. It seems as if the big thing is not necessarily believing in a god, but that there is a possibility of no heaven, no afterlife. To most people, this is just too frightening for them to face: that there is the biggest of possibilities that they are only temporary beings. It boils down to our species being egocentric, each person not being able to imagine some sort of existence going on without them. It's very biological and probably survival-based, but it terrifies people. Death is so... permanent. We'd apparently all rather "follow the light."

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