Thursday, July 26, 2012

Proselytizing, Evil, Etc Open Thread

Since a couple of people seem to want to discuss it, I am creating an open thread on my six-month-gone post on the Slacktiverse entitled The Problem of Proselytizing.

Spam, hate speech, and personal abuse, directed at anyone, will be deleted. I get to define what comprises any of those things, but I will apply the same standards to everyone regardless of position.

Edit: Adding a list of useful links to the original discussion:

21 comments:

  1. [[Originally posted by Timothy (TRiG)
    I really must reread Froborr's piece on atheism. It's interesting, because, to me, there's a very clear, obvious, and instinctual difference between this person is evil and this action is evil. To me, neither one implies the other. At all.

    Yet clearly other people think differently, and think that people saying what I just said above are making up absurd rationalisations.

    And that's rather fascinating in itself, quite independent of the actual message of the post. I really must read that post again, and decide what on Earth I think of it.

    TRiG.]]

    I strongly disagreed with Froborr's position on proselytizing well before the post in question went up, I think dating back to when Froborr described some of his thoughts on the matter in response to something Fred Clark had written.

    My memory is hazy, but I think I initially stayed out of the thread because I figured I'd have little to say beyond, "No, you're wrong."

    Even so a lot of the criticisms of it took me by surprise in similar ways. I just had, "But those words don't mean that," areas of total incomprehension.

    I don't want to get into too much detail here but, as an example, where a lot of people came away from the post as the last line saying atheists were evil, I came away from it as saying that many/most vocal religious adherents and some vocal atheists advocate evil. Obviously completely different.

    Attempts to explain my interpretation of those words ultimately got dismissed as absurd rationalization, but it's what I thought it meant on first reading, and it still reads that way to me. (Ok, many/most vs. some is me bringing in outside anecdata, but it being pointed at religion as much as atheism seemed clear to me in the original text.)

    -

    And with things like that, I've got no clue whatsoever what to do because everyone can read things for themselves. But if they come away with views so different that they can't even understand how someone else could in good faith think something different (which is what I presume led to people assuming I was acting in bad faith) I don't know if there is a solution.

    Maybe one just has to accept that such things happen and weather the storm.

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    1. where a lot of people came away from the post as the last line saying atheists were evil, I came away from it as saying that many/most vocal religious adherents and some vocal atheists advocate evil.

      Yes, exactly. That's what I got out of it.

      I also looked at is as sort of a distillation of an argument that had been had many times, at great length, on Fred's old blog.

      The vast majority of folks who would show up to proselytize for Christianity were RTC-types who either wouldn't stay around when they realized what kind of place they'd come to, or would start flame wars but be clearly outnumbered.

      OTOH, there were a few atheists who also viewed proselytizing as a good idea for whatever reason, and were usually well-liked on other points, and the the point those of us on Froborr's side of the argument was "Yes, you too are being a jerk on this issue, because you are assuming people don't have a right to their own thoughts and experiences of the universe."

      Ruby was often on the other side of that argument, and it would have been wonderful to have her perspective. And the atheist roundtable was the thing I was most looking forward to when The Slacktiverse started up. I think it was worth having, in any imperfect form, to have the viewpoints of atheist community members...SRSLY, if I had a time machine, getting the published (before Froborr's article) would be high on my list of wrongs to right.

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    2. On time machines: Oh heck yeah.

      Also, in hindsight, I would probably not have used Greta Christina's article. I was halfway through writing mine when I saw hers, and I thought, "Aha, here's an excellent example of what I'm talking about!"

      That's the thing about evil; most of it is done by innocuous, decent people who just happen to momentarily forget that they're dealing with, you know, actual people.

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    3. decent people who just happen to momentarily forget that they're dealing with, you know, actual people.

      Yeah, there's a reason that a recent post on my blog was just me trying to say in a bunch of different ways that what is done to real people is real regardless of the means used.

      I was talking primarily about words over the internet, but I see the same problem in rhetoric and, unfortunately, legislation.

      Once it becomes sufficiently abstract, people just seem to forget that they're doing things to real people.

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  2. Probably worth noting that that was me talking about the post in isolation, without subsequent clarifications.

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  4. Calling the act of showing someone the truth (that is, the truth that the caller believes) evil is... well, it speaks of the privilege of the author, really. A person who was born with the privilege of not having been raised in the midst of falsehoods all his or her life, telling those of us who've clawed our way out that it was wrong for us to be shown that light?

    And claiming as a reason, not experience, but hypothetical feelings? It's ignoring the words and actions of people who've gone through the thing he or she has not gone through. When we say "that's not right, you simply don't understand," and you call our actions evil... well, there are some very clear parallels I could draw, but I don't really need to, now do I?

    Froborr, because you were never really a theist, and didn't grow up among them, you don't know what it's like. And from your privileged, ignorant position, the thing to do is NOT to act like you have some understanding of our life experiences. Shut Up and Listen. We know whether our experiences were worth the cost. And unlike you, we know the price of living in the midst of falsehoods. (Assuming you and I are both correct, of course! A very big assumption!) So don't presume to speak for us. Don't presume you have the experience necessary to judge what you've judged.

    It's demeaning. To our experiences, to our identity, and to our lives.

    There are plenty of disagreements to be had when it comes to how to approach someone who doesn't believe what we believe, but you need to listen: Living in the midst of falsehoods, being told that every little human thing about you will send you into an eternal hellfire? That's so much worse, on a daily basis, than the discomfort of finding out the truth that if you knew, if you'd ever experienced it, you would never, ever confuse it for the pain of letting go of the evils put upon you. It's like you're saying that helping an abuse victim escape from their abuser is evil, because... well, because it's not pleasant.

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    1. Thank you. I was really hoping this thread would generate some actually substantive disagreement with my original post.

      It may be a day or two before I can respond to the substance of your comment due to other demands on my time, but I wanted to make sure to thank you for that as soon as possible.

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  5. I think that Fred Clark's description of how to do Evangelism right, especially if you stick to the first four points which don't rely on Christian scripture, is a good model for anyone who thinks they have good news to deliver to others, and I presume atheists looking to convert people do believe they have good news to deliver.

    The whole thing can be found here but a few key points (paraphrased) are:

    Don't force it on anyone. If they don't want you to start, don't start. If they want you to stop you stop.

    This is not a thing to be done to strangers, you need a relationship. A real relationship that is based on actual friendship rather than a desire to convert.

    Communication goes two ways. If you want someone to listen to you, you listen to them. If you want them to seriously consider changing themselves based on what you say, you better be willing to seriously consider changing yourself based on what they say.

    Spreading good news is about spreading good news. Not arguing. You tell your story. Why are you better because of the good thing you want others to have a chance to partake in. Story, not argument. Beginning: I became [whatever you are that you think other person would benefit from becoming], middle (which should be more substantial than the beginning) that has influenced my life in X, Y, and Z good ways since then, ending isn't written yet because you're not dead.

    -

    This was immediately criticized because someone doing that might be converted as easily as they might convert. I see that as a feature, not a bug. If things are placed on equal footing, hopefully the truth wins out in the end. And whoever you are, whatever you have to say, you might be wrong. If you're going to try to change someone on the basis that you think they're wrong, it would be hypocritical to not be open to the possibility of change on the basis that they think you're wrong.

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  6. Replying here because the columns start out pretty narrow:

    I'm sympathetic to a lot that Anthony says, but converts from religion are also a minority, and not all of the religious believe the eternal hellfire stuff. I do think that the case for proselytizing gets a lot easier when the targets are this sort of believer - I'm not generally in favor of totally unsolicited proselytizing, but if I find out that someone is actually suffering right now because of their fear of hell (for self or others), I'd be inclined to chime in.

    I'm not a fan of the "by force" or "evil in its purest form" talk from the original post, but I think you've heard the objections to that and I wasn't personally offended, so I don't think there's much need for my voice there. I argued in comments to the original that respect for autonomy required at least some effort to make sure that other people understand why you believe what you believe, and in general I think the original post was overly utilitarian and was too much concerned with suffering and not at all concerned with other values that many people have for their own lives.

    I also largely agree with Chris just above, in that almost all proselytizing* should take place in the context of established relationships, and one should not seek out relationships solely or largely in order to win converts. That said, let me write a few paragraphs about where I disagree:

    I don't think you necessarily need to think of your position as "good news". I might bring up the dangers of climate change in conversation, which is only good news in a loose "better to know than not know" sense, given that there's not much one person can do to stop it. Autonomy is important here - most people want to know this kind of stuff, even if the truth is crappy. Lots of people think that it's independently good to believe true things, even if those true things don't make your life materially better. Some people don't, and perhaps it would be wrong to try to convince these people of certain true claims, though I think these people are rare. And this absolutely can take the form of argument (not in the sense of combative argument, but as opposed to story-telling). I've had plenty of arguments with friends and acquaintances with whom I disagree, and people did in fact change their minds as a result of those arguments, including ones about philosophical topics.

    I note here that when we're talking about metaphysics, it also matters what everyone involved thinks a metaphysical belief /is/ - there are people who think that one person who says "Jesus is the son of God" and one person who says "there is no God" aren't actually disagreeing with each other. For these people, metaphysical beliefs are something like interpretive frameworks (many worlds vs fundamental randomness for QM, say), and here arguments don't work for obvious reasons. Two people who have a different perspective on that fundamental question can very thoroughly misunderstand each other, because often each person's perspective is thought to be perfectly obvious.

    Finally, while we should always maintain epistemic humility and be open to the possibility of being wrong, that doesn't necessarily mean (and I don't know if Chris is saying it is) that we should be exactly as open to being shown to be wrong as we think the people we're talking to should be.

    *I except fairly un-intrusive public speech like billboards and t-shirts. But no going door to door.

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  7. Where's the follow-up post to "If Aliens, Then God?" where you explain why your argument makes any kind of sense? Still waiting.

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    1. It's been hovering at about 30% pretty much all summer. Other obligations have repeatedly got in the way. Sorry.

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  8. "Calling the act of showing someone the truth (that is, the truth that the caller believes) evil is... "

    Not what I did. I called proselytizing evil. Telling someone what you believe is not necessarily proselytizing. Writing books about atheism, making blogs, and so on is not proselytizing. Proselytizing is when you go into someone else's house, invade someone else's space, either against their preferences or without asking their preferences. It's when you start seeing the world as a competition between Us and Them, and try to recruit more players on Our Side.

    You were abused, Anthony, and so were many, many people like you. I'm not trying to minimize that. More to the point, I explicitly stated in The Problem of Proselytizing that if a belief is both demonstrably false and demonstrably harmful enough that it creates an immediate danger to a person, you *do* have justification to intervene to help that person, even if that requires trying to change someone's beliefs against their will. Thus, there is nothing evil about trying to change the perpetrators of spiritual abuse, and I would never argue that there is.

    And, as I believe I stated in the comments in one of those threads, trying to change someone's beliefs when they have invited you to do so is perfectly legitimate, and there are many ways in which someone can implicitly invite such attempts, such as trying to change your beliefs, reading something you wrote, walking into a classroom or debate forum on a relevant topic, and so forth.

    As I said, I have no intent of minimizing what you experienced. My fiancee was raised in a similarly toxic, abusive, and (yes) evil faith, and it still affects her in painful ways years after she left. But, as demonstrated by the existence of moderate and non-authoritarian religion, none of that necessarily follows from being religious; it is a product of specific actions by particular religious people based on particular elements of their belief.

    To take the example you gave, of belief in Hell, many Christians and Muslims do not believe in eternal damnation, including some entire denominations (such as Unitarians); to my knowledge, other than the very small (and shrinking) Zoroastrian faith, no other religion preaches eternal damnation at all. Proselytization, however, requires ignoring these differences. Atheist proselytizing requires lumping all theists together as one big Them (just as, say, Mormon proselytizing requires lumping all non-Mormons) and recruiting in an attempt to make Them into Us.

    When you talk about making your beliefs universal, regardless of whether you are a theist or an atheist, you’re talking about a lot of people, most of whom are not spiritually abusive, anti-science, fundamentalist, authoritarian, or particularly violent. You’re talking about people whose behavior does not create an immediate threat to themselves or others, and who do not have any desire to adopt your beliefs. There is no way to hold this goal unless you believe that They are not moral agents capable of making their own judgments based on their experience, like We are; They must be guided to the correct answers, because they will never reach them on Their own.

    Or, to put it more simply, They are not really people the way We are people.

    That’s why I stand by calling such a goal evil. It’s evil when Greta Christina states it as the end-goal of the “atheist movement”; it’s evil when Fred Clark states it as the end-goal of Christianity. Do I think Greta Christina or Fred Clark are evil people? No; I don’t think such a category exists, and even if it did, I would never put either of them in it. But evil is treating people as something other than people, and proselytizing treats people as something other than people.

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    1. "Proselytizing is when you go into someone else's house, invade someone else's space, either against their preferences or without asking their preferences."

      You can't just redefine words to suit yourself. In common usage, proselytism is the act of attempting to convert someone to your way of thinking. That's it. It doesn't have to be door-to-door. Laying out the evidence for your position in a blog or a book is proselytism.

      If we go by *your* definition of proselytising, Greta Christina doesn't advocate anything like that. Is she saying we should go to people's houses to convert them to atheism? No she's not. So why do you keep bring her up? It's theists who force their beliefs on people.

      Not only do you need to resort to your own special definition of proselytism to make your argument work, but you ignore the fact that successful proselytism requires you to first empathise with the person you're trying to persuade. You keep harping on this "evil acts vs evil people" distinction as if it's some profound insight, but you're still labelling a whole load of acts evil. Is going door-to-door to canvas for a political candidate evil? Is trying to raise awareness of climate change evil because you might try to persuade people who don't want to know about it?

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  9. “there are people who think that one person who says "Jesus is the son of God" and one person who says "there is no God" aren't actually disagreeing with each other. For these people, metaphysical beliefs are something like interpretive frameworks (many worlds vs fundamental randomness for QM, say), and here arguments don't work for obvious reasons.”

    I believe that, sort of. There is no physical test that can distinguish the first claim from the second, and thus they are equivalent claims from a positive standpoint. The decision to believe one, the other, or neither is thus entirely normative.

    “I argued in comments to the original that respect for autonomy required at least some effort to make sure that other people understand why you believe what you believe, and in general I think the original post was overly utilitarian and was too much concerned with suffering and not at all concerned with other values that many people have for their own lives.”

    I disagree, as I stated above. I think respect for autonomy requires letting people decide for themselves whether they want to be exposed to your beliefs or not, and leave it up to them to ask/put themselves in situations where a reasonable person would expect to be exposed to new beliefs.

    I’m actually a little surprised you found it utilitarian, because I regard “evil” as an inherently deontological concept. Let’s say you found a belief that always causes increased happiness, and also you have a magical mind-control device: From a strictly utilitarian perspective, it is not only permitted but compulsory to use your mind-control device to force everyone in the world to share that belief; the only reason not to do is that it’s, y’know, evil—that is, it violates deontological principles that cannot be expressed in utilitarian terms.

    But I am also of the view that none of the big three moral systems (utilitarianism, deontology, and character ethics) are complete in themselves; they must be balanced against each other. Sometimes you have to be a little evil in order to alleviate suffering; other times you might have to pass on achieving optimal happiness because it requires too much evil; still other times you have to ask yourself, What Would the Doctor Do? (Or whoever your preferred Example of Good Character is.) Sticking consistently to one moral system is inevitably going to get you in trouble with the other two.

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  10. @Anonymous:

    Replying here because of the narrowing. (Turns out I can't adjust the widths with this blog template, and changing blog templates will require quite a bit of playing around until I find one I like.)

    I haven't redefined "proselytizing" at all. Jews (as most people know) don't proselytize, but they do write blog posts and publish books about what they believe. Clearly, therefore, neither of those behaviors is always proselytizing.

    Your definition is actually correct--it is seeking to convert others to your viewpoint. In other words, the difference between proselytizing and just expressing an opinion or view is a matter of intent. Saying "this is what I believe and why I believe it" is not proselytizing; "this is what I believe and why *you* should believe it" is.

    Of course intent is not always knowable, but sometimes people (intentionally or otherwise) will tell you what their intent is. In the case of the Greta Christina article, she expresses that her intent is universal atheism--proselytizing, in other words. Her attitude is clearly (as I argued) that religious people are Other and must be converted into atheists before they can be tolerated.

    I stand by classifying that intent and that attitude as evil.

    For the examples you give (door-to-door canvassing, global warming activism), it again comes down to intent. If somebody is uninterested, will you press on them regardless of what they want? Is your goal universal support for your candidate/cause, or providing information to the undecided/correcting misinformation?

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    1. There's no meaningful distinction between "explaining what you believe and why you believe it" and "seeking to convert others to your viewpoint". Giving the evidence for your belief will automatically cause most people to update their probability estimates for your belief being true. The exceptions are fanatics who will discount all evidence that contradicts their worldview.

      Therefore, *any* account of one's beliefs and their foundations must count as proselytism. Assuming both of us are rational, the reasons why *I* believe something are the same as the reasons *you* should believe it - Aumann's agreement theorem proves it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_Agreement_Theorem

      Now, it's true that there are coercive methods of proselytism (forcing people to convert to your beliefs through social ostracism or even official sanctions, burning adherents of other sects, shooting up their temples etc), but Greta Christina doesn't advocate or practise them (as far as I am aware).

      Your distinction between trying for "universal support for your candidate/cause, or providing information to the undecided/correcting misinformation" is also meaningless. Take the case of somebody trying to persuade people that global warming is real. If it is real, those goals are one and the same - correcting misinformation about global warming among the whole population is the same thing as persuading everybody that it's real.

      Also, somebody who has fallen victim to misinformation about global warming might initially be uninterested because they think the whole thing's a hoax or whatever, but afterwards be grateful to learn the truth. According to you, it's never OK to persuade someone of a truth that they initially resist, no matter how much better off it would make them. By your logic, trying to save people from letting their children die of preventable diseases, or forcibly medicated a schizophrenic with life-threatening delusions, are also "evil" acts.

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    2. PS: I'm glad you accept that your definition of proselytising as being "when you go into someone else's house, invade someone else's space" was wrong.

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    3. Both your comments demonstrate a complete lack of reading comprehension (assuming both anonymous comments are from the same person, of course).

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    4. That's all you can manage? Ad hominem abuse?

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