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nameandnature- deconversion | Black, White and Gray
- Some Christian sociologists did some research into why people leave, by looking at 50 de-conversion "testimonies". Results: intellectual problems (hell, suffering, reliability of the Bible); God's failure to answer prayer; other Christians responding to doubt in trite or unhelpful ways. Contact with unbelievers wasn't often cited as a cause of de-conversion.
(tags: psychology de-conversion christianity religion sociology) - I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones
- "My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine."
(tags: economics work warehouse poverty shopping shipping online amazon) - Why Richard Dawkins is still an atheist - Guest Voices - The Washington Post
- Paula Kirby on the recent "Dawkins admits he's an agnostic!" stories following his debate with Cuddly Rowan Bear. "Religious commentators have become so excited at the thought of his conversion that I almost don’t have the heart to break it to them that he said nothing in Thursday’s discussion that he hadn’t already said six years ago in "The God Delusion""
(tags: the god delusion religion agnosticism paula-kirby richard-dawkins dawkins atheism)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 12:11 pm (UTC)I was disappointed that, although the introductory blurb mentioned that testimonies like that are a good source of hypotheses but a bad way to test them, they didn't follow up that comment by actually making a rigorous attempt to test their hypothesis before proposing a programme of sermons focusing on the observed problem areas.
That also seemed like an optimistic idea even supposing the hypothesis does stand up to rigorous testing, since it kind of assumes that these deconverts haven't encountered the highest-quality Christian counterarguments for the various things they have problems with, rather than that they have encountered them and been unimpressed. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that a lot of those deconverts had actually deliberately googled for the apologetics in question in the hope of being reconvinced.