this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Wherever it's going, step 1 is, if possible, engaging on their own terms with material they have accepted. No one is going to be receptive to just rejecting the belief system they grew up with just because someone said so.
If the scam artist is tapping into the material they were fed growing up and framing what they want in those terms, and your counter point is "well everything you were fed growing up with was stupid", guess who wins?
Well, no one, because the problem isn't the scammer, the problem is the fact they're still religious.
Whether you agree with them being religious or not, the fact remains their opinions hold sway and to be utterly dismissive because of their faith is to leave them vulnerable to manipulation.
Organized religion can be dangerous as it ascribes the authority of a god to the words of man. By refusing to engage at all on their own terms, you would give even more power to the words of unscrupulous people.
Who said anything about being dismissive? The solution isn't to allow them to dominate everyone by capitulating to them thinking we need their help or approval for anything. The answer is to simply move on without them and to build a new empire they're not allowed to control or participate in out of the old, and to let them rot in the ruins of the old.
The problem isn't scammers. The problem is evil religious types.
In the US, about 2/3rds of people are Christian. It's hard to argue for moving on without the majority of the population. The vast majority of which can be reasoned with, but they are going to be less likely to be receptive if the people talking are just saying how dumb their beliefs are and that they were raised wrong.
I may wish we spent less time fixated on the words of people long gone, and trying to claim authority by making up how we think they would have responded to some modern issue they never were faced with. This is not just religion, but also with historical figures (e.g. all the "founding fathers" speculation) or dead celebrities. However we can't ignore how values were instilled in folks when we have the chance to appeal to the better teachings of their upbringing.