A Manual for Creating Atheists by Boghossian Peter

Author:Boghossian, Peter [Boghossian, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2013-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

NOTES

My parents’ generation, and presumably the generation before them, went out of their way to insist that they knew what was best for their children. Even my own progressive parents maintained this attitude. It is my hope that the children my wife and I are raising will not be hobbled by the same sense of certainty that was so rife in previous generations. Indeed, I think there’s a more egalitarian relationship between children and parents now than at any time in the recent past.

It is my sincere hope that a field of academic study can develop around issues related to recovery from religion and faith, including how to raise skeptical children. Furthermore, innovative and gratifying careers can be based upon developing inoculation and containment strategies that promote the value of belief on the basis of reason and evidence, as opposed to believing on the basis of anything else. This is a pristine area ripe for study.

It may be worth looking at the literature on grief, specifically, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s views on grief (Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005). I’ve just started incorporating her richer understanding of loss, as applied to faith, to deepen and enrich my interventions.

Our objective should be to create people who have learned key lessons from Socrates, Nietzsche, and the Four Horsemen—people who understand the dangers inherent in faulty reasoning processes, certainty, and religiosity. We need to create a society that holds not pretending to know things one doesn’t know as a virtue, as opposed to the contemporary view that holding a belief with certainty makes one a better person.

Nevada, where my parents lived and my mother died, does not have a Death with Dignity law. The faithful have extinguished hope that my mother, and others who are dying slow, painful deaths, can pass gracefully at a time of their choosing. As of 2013, only Oregon and Washington have Death with Dignity laws, and even those laws are highly restrictive. Tragically, the primary reason that terminal patients enduring tremendous pain are unable to quickly and painlessly end their lives, but are instead forced to endure days, weeks, or months of misery and suffering, is intertwined with the same false certainty created by faith. It’s a toxic problem when people believe the demands of their faith tradition apply to people who do not share their faith. This is evidenced by the Catholic Church’s campaign against Death with Dignity measures.

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