My idea changes all the time :-) I'd like to adopt a style which is chatty and uses short words and tries to be as inviting as possible, saving the harsher words for later in the book when hopefully I've already got the reader wondering.
At the moment it starts with a discussion of how easily people fool themselves, going into the empirical evidence; then it goes on to discuss what means we might employ to avoid fooling ourselves. That would leave 'till last specific discussion of the Emperors New Clothes effect, and the importance of not advancing an argument you don't yourself fully understand - eg don't say "We are finite, but God is infinite" unless you can say what you mean. Here I would want to talk about the idea of "getting there from here" - ie that you can start with observations about things on our own planet and our own scale in space and time, and get to eg quasars and electrons through a chain of reasoning that builds up more sophisticated and abstract phenomena.
At some point in that there would need to be a discussion of why you should care - about why it's better not to fool yourself, about how beliefs that seem harmless today can become harmful tomorrow, and that it's not a good idea to get practiced in pulling the wool over your own eyes. I'm not sure exactly how to write this part and I'm giving it quite a bit of thought - there's a connection with whether you really believe what you believe, and whether you allow it to affect your actions, but there's a chicken-and-egg problem in that I don't think I can convince that religion is hooey unless I can convince that it matters, but I don't see how to do the latter without doing the former either.
Anyway, then a discussion of the absolutely central role that obfuscation and confusion play in all defences of religion. After that I'd take a leaf out of the above book and discuss what atheism is and isn't, talk about agnosticism, and set out the complete incoherence of all attempts to discuss a god or gods, basically hammering home over and over again (with quotes) that religion says things that sound like they mean something, that make you feel as if you have been communicated with, without actually getting you anywhere.
There the intellectual case ends (perhaps modulo a short section on example arguments people make for religion and how the preceding section arms you to answer them) , but I'd want to go on to talk about eg the messed-up teachings of Jesus, and conclude that religion is what happens when a school of thought starts to become optimised entirely for memetic success through suppression of criticism - eg since the rewards and punishments happen off stage and no demonstration is needed, there is no reason not to turn the dials up to not eleven but infinity.
There also needs to be something answering the charge that the new atheists are too mean - I'm not sure where that goes.
It's unlikely to ever get beyond the stage of commenting about it on LJ, mind!
no subject
At the moment it starts with a discussion of how easily people fool themselves, going into the empirical evidence; then it goes on to discuss what means we might employ to avoid fooling ourselves. That would leave 'till last specific discussion of the Emperors New Clothes effect, and the importance of not advancing an argument you don't yourself fully understand - eg don't say "We are finite, but God is infinite" unless you can say what you mean. Here I would want to talk about the idea of "getting there from here" - ie that you can start with observations about things on our own planet and our own scale in space and time, and get to eg quasars and electrons through a chain of reasoning that builds up more sophisticated and abstract phenomena.
At some point in that there would need to be a discussion of why you should care - about why it's better not to fool yourself, about how beliefs that seem harmless today can become harmful tomorrow, and that it's not a good idea to get practiced in pulling the wool over your own eyes. I'm not sure exactly how to write this part and I'm giving it quite a bit of thought - there's a connection with whether you really believe what you believe, and whether you allow it to affect your actions, but there's a chicken-and-egg problem in that I don't think I can convince that religion is hooey unless I can convince that it matters, but I don't see how to do the latter without doing the former either.
Anyway, then a discussion of the absolutely central role that obfuscation and confusion play in all defences of religion. After that I'd take a leaf out of the above book and discuss what atheism is and isn't, talk about agnosticism, and set out the complete incoherence of all attempts to discuss a god or gods, basically hammering home over and over again (with quotes) that religion says things that sound like they mean something, that make you feel as if you have been communicated with, without actually getting you anywhere.
There the intellectual case ends (perhaps modulo a short section on example arguments people make for religion and how the preceding section arms you to answer them) , but I'd want to go on to talk about eg the messed-up teachings of Jesus, and conclude that religion is what happens when a school of thought starts to become optimised entirely for memetic success through suppression of criticism - eg since the rewards and punishments happen off stage and no demonstration is needed, there is no reason not to turn the dials up to not eleven but infinity.
There also needs to be something answering the charge that the new atheists are too mean - I'm not sure where that goes.
It's unlikely to ever get beyond the stage of commenting about it on LJ, mind!