I predict it'll require brain surgery.
Pretty much. They need legitimate cult deprogramming.
And if you have the conversational acumen and feel safe doing so, giving them a safe space to dialog and ask questions in good faith can be a good place to start.
The interviewee basically said that he was able to get out once he was able to do that, which is huge, because Fundamentalism often disparages asking questions.
giving them a safe space to dialog and ask questions in good faith can be a good place to start.
That's the rub, though, isn't it? Too many of them simply aren't prepared to discuss such things in good faith. They often approach any discussion with an outsider defensively. Getting them to let their guard down long enough to have an honest conversation isn't always as simple as giving them the space to do so. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
It certainly is the rub. It's not something I'd undertake with just any random fundie. I'd have to know them and what kind of person they are, first.
I suppose you might say it's about leveraging relational equity to have a dialogue.
Cast them into the sea. Give them one of those olde tyme punishments from the good book.
Nothing. They're cultists. They support the exact opposite of what Jesus stood for, and just want the world to burn so they can be raptured to heaven, to hell with everyone else.
Fuck them.
Can we stage a faux rapture and relocate them to one of the earth's polar regions?
The sun would be a better climate for them.
Lowering the bar on access to contrary information will probably play a factor.
As long as you need to search, filter, read, and analyze to realize that something is BS, there's far less people that will do that.
Within a few years LLMs will be good enough they can do most of that work for them, and have a back and forth that immediately addresses counterpoints.
I think we'll see a significant spike in the number of people leaving conservative religious traditions when that's the case.
LLMs can currently be convinced that God exists, so I wouldn't put too much weight on that.
When you can ignore 1000 detractions and cling to a single flimsy confirmation of your bias, the problem isn't the quality of the information available and how it's presented, it's the quality of the person and their willingness to reason.
I really don't understand how people watching a technology that goes from experts saying "XYZ will be impossible for the technology" in 2019 and then having that very thing happen only three years later in 2022 with researchers having a surprised Pikachu face so regularly refer to it as if the present state of the tech is going to remain a status quo for the foreseeable future.
You do realize it's going to continue to improve at a ridiculous rate, right?
Even the version that exists today has managed to have over a 100% increase in its performance on various evaluations simply by researchers better learning how to use it over the past year. And we're likely getting a new leap forward in the models themselves next year.
I wouldn't be so quick to ignore thousands of indicators the technology is advancing to stick with the notion the tech isn't going to make a difference based on its present limitations.
I didn't say the tech won't improve, I said the basis of the point being made - to educate the religious away from religion - won't occur. That has everything to do with challenging philosophical conjectures or unproven belief systems, and nothing to do with ChatGPT's ability to produce content that could be convincing or build upon it given more input.
Part of my work involves using and integrating ChatGPT with other systems. I see the the evolution right in front of my every day, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to my point.
I see the the evolution right in front of my every day, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to my point.
It's often hard to see the forest when you are focused on the trees.
If you read the article, look at what changed his mind, look at other deconversion stories, and look at where the tech is going in ~3 years, then I guess I just really don't see it the same way as you, as to my eye it will make quite a bit of damn difference when someone beginning to question can have the heavy lifting of self-education significantly reduced.
If you're willing to extrapolate the experience of one believer and their opinion, then yes, but that's not enough for me.
And treating my experience working directly with said technology as narrower than it is, is your prerogative, but I don't know why you'd expect me to take your opinion seriously after doing so.
I used to think the same thing about massive amounts of people being able to connect to each other (instead of only a few gatekeepers being able to blast out information in one direction) and have easy access to the “information superhighway” in the days when the Internet was being opened up.
These days…I am a bit more skeptical about some of my fellow humans becoming more enlightened due to a change in tech. I think it might be possible that people become even more stupid.
I made it out, somehow
Same. Although it wasn't easy.
And I think the more you sort of say to people, “You’re one of them,” I think the more you leave them little room, and you’re pushing them towards those extremists.
I think we would benefit from keeping this in mind more. There’s some rampant labeling online, sometimes just based on a profile photo, that practically traps some people into shitty views. As much as it’s fun to OK boomer or Karen people, that shit is probably very alienating in a way that isn’t leaving a clear path back into the fold of moral approval.
I dunno, man. If I say something off-hand and get called a racist or homophobe or transphobe or bigot or misogynist or whatever, I take a hard introspective look at what I said and why it was perceived that way. I don't pull a Principle Skinner and say everyone else is wrong before digging in even deeper.
These people were just fine standing among their white supremacist brethren until they started being called out for their shit.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
They helped inspire the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade last year, and their steadfast support of former President Trump could return him to the White House.
The book is titled “Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation,” and it’s by Jon Ward, the chief national correspondent at Yahoo!
The son of a pastor, Ward would go on to become a White House reporter, traveling the world on Air Force One with former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
I think that with his (Johnson’s) sort of surprise ascent into such a position of power so close to the presidency, there’s a lot more attention now on the kind of conservative Christian beliefs that have been common among millions of evangelicals for decades.
But this at this moment, they’re merging with a strain of anti-democratic apocalyptic forms of Christianity that have already shown a willingness to throw out respect for the Constitution and democracy.
The word “evangelical” has become more and more wobbly over the last decade because the Trump movement has been able to bring in a lot of people to this style of fusing religion and politics.
The original article contains 1,769 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 89%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
There is nothing we can do but wait for the second coming
It's been 2000 years. I think it might not end up happening.
Honestly, if evangelicals want their witness back and for people to actually take them seriously, they have to decouple themselves from the Republican Party.
They always say they are being persecuted for their faith. No, no one's persecuting anyone. You're being criticized for your extremist politics, which is totally fair game. In turn, that it trashing your witness and you feel persecuted.
There's plenty we can do. Don't give your money/tithes to churches who support Christian nationalism. Don't attend those churches. Call out their false beliefs. Don't vote for people who support Christian nationalism. Get it through the minds of Christians that their personal religious beliefs don't get to be used to control the rest of the population.
If y'all sit on your asses waiting for the 2nd coming (something that was supposed to happen before Jesus' contemporary generation died) then YOU are the problem.
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