Ratings7
Average rating3.7
For thousands of years, the faithful have honed proselytizing strategies and talked people into believing the truth of one holy book or another. Indeed, the faithful often view converting others as an obligation of their faith--and are trained from an early age to spread their unique brand of religion. The result is a world broken in large part by unquestioned faith. As an urgently needed counter to this tried-and-true tradition of religious evangelism, A Manual for Creating Atheists offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith--but for talking them out of it. Peter Boghossian draws on the tools he has developed and used for more than twenty years as a philosopher and educator to teach how to engage the faithful in conversations that will help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their religious beliefs, mistrust their faith, abandon superstition and irrationality, and ultimately embrace reason.
[(Source)][1]
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter-Boghossian/dp/1939578094/ref=dp_return_1?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
Reviews with the most likes.
This was like reading the philosophy text books I hated so much in college.
A Manual for Creating Atheists offers a practical perspective on how best to talk to people about faith and religion. Unlike other recent authors (Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins etc..) Boghossian's book concentrates on how to separate people from their faith and not just why it's a good idea. I'm excited to try out Boghossian's methods as he makes an excellent case for why they are effective and I'm expecting them to be superior to my former techniques. The main thing that I'll be doing differently is only addressing faith as a bad system of knowledge (via the socratic method) and avoiding the specifics of any religion or claim. Boghossian isn't the best writer of all time, but his writing doesn't get in the way of his message. I did find the unelaborated references to classic philosophy to be a little off-putting. A long list of greeks doesn't really help me.
Overall I enjoyed it and it's given me a bunch of new tools for dealing with the faithful.