14 quotes
Peter Boghossian's techniques of friendly persuasion are not mine, and maybe I'd be more effective if they were. They are undoubtedly very persuasive — and very much needed.
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)
Know when to walk away, even when the conversation is going well.
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)
The most difficult thing to accept for people who work hard at forming their beliefs on the basis of evidence is that not everyone forms their beliefs in that way.
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)
To argue that people need faith is to abandon hope, and to condescend and accuse the faithful of being incapable of understanding the importance of reason and rationality.
A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013)
When your conversation partner is getting angry, the single best thing you can do in most circumstances is to stop whatever else you're doing and listen.
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)
Inquiry and wonder must replace dogmatism and certainty. The long-term goal is to create conditions that turn the dispositions of inquiring and wondering into culturally trumpeted values.
A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013)
Most basic elements of civil discussion, especially over matters of substantive disagreement, come down to a single theme: making the other person in a conversation a partner, not an adversary.
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)
A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person. [...] Ideas don't deserve dignity; people deserve dignity.
A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013)
Don't complain, apologize, or mumble in the defense of reason. [...] Tell people exactly what you think and why you think it.
A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013)
Here's a heresy: "How do you know that?" is a powerful question for helping people think, but it's not the best question. The best question is, "How could that belief be wrong?"
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)
Give faith-based justifications no countenance. [...] Let the utterer know that faith is not an acceptable basis from which to draw a conclusion that can be relied upon.
A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013)
Seemingly impossible conversations typically have one thing in common: they're about moral beliefs rooted in one's sense of identity, but they play out on the level of facts (or assertions, name-calling, grandstanding, threats, etc.).
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)
The thrust of our message must be that there are things we don't know and it's okay not to know— even in death. Not claiming to know something you don't know isn't a character flaw, it is a virtue.
A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013)
What it means to hold a belief based on evidence is, by definition, that one is open to the possibility that evidence might be discovered that would change one's mind. If no evidence would change one's mind, then one is not forming one's beliefs on the basis of evidence.
How to Have Impossible Conversations (2019)