I don’t watch videos like that. Unless someone wants to hire me to develop a reasoned and researched reply to it.

But, that said:

We touched on the morality subject in our debate and he couldn’t get around my rebuttals even there. But debates (and videos) are typically the worst places for this because they are on clock and use emotive tactics to distort and manipulate audiences with strategic omissions and emphases and unchecked claims asserted with unearned confidence.

So the best place to go is writing, where the affect is flatter, the data more complete, and nuances preserved.

And to that end see my article:

The Ontology of Logic

Which covers logic. Presuppers often start with a fallacy of conflating natural with invented tools of reason, on which then applies my article:

The Argument from Reason

But on the matter of morality see my journal article:

Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes

And then the articles it links to for more depth.

On specifically “leftist” stuff (which is another conflation, confusing ethics with metaethics):

How Far Left Is Too Left?

vs.

An Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions

Anyway,

I was wondering if you had 2 hours to give your take on, ANDREW WILSON – What Happens to Morality When You Remove God? – OFF LIMITS W/ BRYAN CALLEN – YouTube.

Specifically, your opinion of Andrew’s Presuppositional apologetics, which he believes is the bullet that slayed Matt Dillahunty and which he thinks will slay Harris, Alex O’Connor, and any atheist who gets in his way. I would hate to see Alex waste an afternoon listening to a presupper going on about the laws of logic and such.

I also just got a 15-minute clip in my YouTube suggestions, “This Is Why I HATE Leftists” – Andrew Wilson DISMANTLES Progressive’s Atheist Morality where Andrew expands a little on his problem with atheists and morality.

Cheers.

Indeed. Which only advertises his worldview’s irrationality—and the irrationality of everyone who doesn’t realize that.

The usual wilson tactic. Never defend your position. Attempt to trip up your opponent and declare victory and say “see, my worldview is the inly right worldview”.

Thank you for this. It’s so useful to collect people’s accounts, as it helps us understand what’s really happening “on the ground” as it were.

Your example of Rausch isn’t apt though as he is a Jewish atheist, and himself openly gay. So he never represented the conservative Christians he tried arguing with. A better example are the scant few conservative Christians in the pro-immigrant lobby (though even that lobby is mostly liberal Christians, not conservatives).

They justify my point that these are rare (not the statistical norm) and they are actually driven by empathy and not anger, which is why they can escape conservatism. Those people will get themselves out eventually. It’s the other 95% we are left to deal with. And in thirty years of experiemce, I have never seen a member of that 95% talked out of it with kindness. Because they are already authoritarian personalities, they can only be moved by authoritarian strategies, or strategies that trigger their authoritarian impulses but in the correct direction.

What authoritarians will do is always (always) exploit any kindness strategy for their ends and not yours. They will use it as cover (enjoying the mask of respectability and deference it entails giving them) and as opportunities for manipulation or recruitment (and thus against any agenda you think you are bringing). This is why interfaith projects always fail. They collapse and end in no net result after time. I am not aware of any counterexample.

I do not know what the “Melting Mountains” event was but dollars to doughnuts it either no longer exists, is struggling to accomplish anything, never actually accomplished any measurable thing, or has by now been captured by either conservatives and liberals and no longer meets them both. Because that is what always happens. I have seen it too many times now.

I experienced what you said with Matt Dillahunty. I “tried honestly to prove him wrong and discovered he wasn’t.” I was progressive, even as a Christian so I didn’t experience the motivation of anger so much. It’s hard for me to accept that is the only motivation conservatives trapped in delusions will respond to. A couple of examples are Jonathan Rausch who spoke to large groups of conservatives about how their anti-gay stands was also anti-family. Also, smaller meetings of Left and Right, like the Melting Mountains event in Oregon have been documented and studied. I can provide more if you like.

I’m not sure what you mean by “blanket vaccination”. Most of us don’t have a reach like yours so we either improve our one-on-one conversations for change or support organizations that are bringing groups together. I think we agree on tactics, just that I’m more averse to the ‘making them mad enough to be honest’ approach.

On the degree to which everyone has to do this themselves, sure, I can’t do the heavy work for someone else, but I can make the first move, get out of my silo, and build a bridge to theirs. You put “nothing you can ever say” in italics, and that may be true for some, but I think you are talking about the far end of the bell curve. Again, I think we agree on these principles with some differences on when and where to deploy strategies.

My experience in 17 years of a progressive church, as an adult, and having friends who are in them now, is the “shepherds” are there too. I have literally had liberal pastors use the word “protect” with regards to their flock.

I respect your observations but I’m not so pessimistic to think the “friendly” approach is not worth it. To me, presenting facts without emotion, the scientific approach, is the friendly approach. It’s how we climbed out of the dark ages and could be the way out of the affective polarization we are experiencing now. There is a correct “how” to presenting scientific information, one that is aware of Jonahtan Haidt’s “Rider and the Elephant” analogy, based on neuroscience that we are unwieldy intuitive animals with our consciousness as the rider.

It wasn’t scripted. But it was a perfect example of why they can’t do real debate.

P.S. My observations track every other testimonial of anyone who escaped the alt-right. See A Continuing List of Examples of Alt-Righters Escaping Their Delusions. There are always only two narratives: they had empathy and empirical values already and eventually started to react in horror to their peer group on their own (so, what we do had no relevance: they got themselves out); or they confronted opposition with some measure of outrage until they had that eureka moment when they realized they were catastrophically wrong about something (which again requires them to have already had the empirical values that can emotionally allow that to even happen).

What Fred said.

Debunking (factually solid refutations and exposés) and prebunking (inoculating; educating before the fact; spreading critical thinking as a skill and a virtue) is all you can do when someone is lost to irrationality and never responds anymore to evidence or logic and only ever reacts emotionally to either. With them, you can reduce the contagion (prevent them infecting more people), not eradicate the disease. Like any other zombie apocalypse.

“Who” is lost here varies. But you can often quickly find out after any significant engagement or observation. And even the few who present as forever lost but are gettable you won’t be able to tell, so you can’t efficiently deploy resources on them. You just have to use blanket vaccination and treatment, and who escapes escapes.

And for them and everyone in the middle, trapped but not completely lost, the best methods are pinging cognitive dissonance: keep debunking them and being right until they get so mad they try to honestly prove you wrong and discover you aren’t. This requires being right. You can’t just mock or make bad arguments, that has the opposite effect; but smartly targeted ridicule works when it is backed by unassailable factual reality. But so does not using ridicule at all, and just being the straight man. You have to select the right method for the context.

But either way, they have to do this themselves, actually listen to challenges to their beliefs (rather than run away and hide in a silo) and actually do the fact-checking (which takes work), and care whether they are wrong and thus able to find out that they are (which requires a previously developed mindset you cannot give them, except via the prebunking program). And the only motivation people trapped in conservative delusions respond to for doing this seriously is anger, as they have suppressed or denigrated or subordinated all other emotions to the point that they can never out-motivate rage. So pinging cognitive dissonance becomes the only effective technique.

The “friendly” approach rarely works. You can produce a polite exchange and get pro-forma promises to look into things and consider changing their mind, but it dissolves the moment you walk away. Anyone with the time and spoons to try that (and I do not) is still welcome to, and maybe they’ll get some people the dissonance track doesn’t, but I am not aware of a single real example of that working—as in, producing a real, lasting shift in POV toward sanity, reality, and empathy.

Everyone of the scores of people who have reported to me that I deconverted them have all said it was my firebrand approach that started them down that path, either because something I said disturbed them that motivated them to try and prove me wrong and failing, or because something I said actually enraged them that motivated them to try and prove me wrong and failing.

But the key here is that they have to already have a mindset that emotionally permits them to disprove their own beliefs. I cannot install that in them. And if they don’t have that, they will never disprove their own beliefs. There is then nothing you can ever say or do. Nothing. Those people are eternally trapped and can never get out. They are lost to delusion (or are a sociopath who was never really interested in what’s true to begin with and are only pretending to).

I also asked for hands raised at a conference of hundreds of atheists once, how many were previously believers (about 75% of the room), and of them, how many started their deconversion after colliding with hostile atheists debunking or mocking their beliefs, and it was almost all of them (so, probably around 70% of the room).

Conversely, every friendly “interfaith” project I ever saw started was dissolved by the believers as soon as they realized that meant nonbelievers got to speak freely to their audience and they didn’t like what their audience was finding out. Believers act like they want to shake hands across the aisle. But that’s usually just posture. They almost never really mean it (they really want access to convert your audience), or don’t really understand what it means, and once they do, they recoil in horror at the very idea of it and shut it down. Which does show that a lot of people are trapped by the silo and not their delusions (otherwise getting to hear us would not be dangerous in the eye of the shepherds), but that’s the point of siloing people: to keep them away from any contact with reality. But only they can step outside of that silo. We can’t barge in there and pull them out.

This is why most apologetics (from Wilson’s to Jones’s) is actually designed to keep the flock in, not to convert any serious thinker to it. Hence why they rely on emotional manipulation, mockery and well poisoning, bullying and belittling, pwn clips rather than arguments or evidence. It’s all designed to convince the audience not to listen to us, and to fear the consequences of agreeing with us. Only pinging cognitive dissonance has any statistically significant chance of breaking through that.

I am aware of only very few trivial exceptions to these observations. And that’s after forty years experience at this.

Do that comparison.

Check the rate of STDs, unplanned pregnancies, etc. in, say, Muslim or Christian Africa, or red states in America.

When you do the comparison honestly, without cherry-picking, it doesn’t go the way you want.

And remember: We’re not just discussing whether a particular practice would be mildly harmful or sub-optimal. We’re discussing whether there should be massive state or cultural coercion.