The Atheist Manual With Bad Advice
Synopsis:
Atheist Manual by Peter Boghossian
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. (Taken from GoodReads page)
Review
From the very beginning of this Atheist manual, Boghossian gets two things wrong. He makes up definitions for “faith” which creates a strawman and he believes faith is an epistemology. Everything else is built on these two foundations which means the rest is using a false definition with a false assumption. Asking questions is completely fine within Christianity and The Bible never says to remove reason or evidence or logic away; in fact, it makes sense and grounds all those concepts.
It is ironic that Boghossian devotes a chapter to combating relativism. He never is able to ground objectivity other than through brute force. So he might want to remove the plank from his camp first before going after the speck in the other side. And while there, he would benefit from actually defining words to what they are and actually establishing how a Christian actually knows things. But why do that when you teach people how to have insincere conversations?
I would encourage people to read this book, especially Christians just so they too can see how ridiculous the ideas are while also wanting to engage atheists in legitimate dialogue. Check out Greg Koukl’s “Tactics” for a legitimate way to have a proper dialogue.
Final Grade
F
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