Tip 2: The Turing Test.
Jan. 13th, 2015 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastThe following is a bit of an online conversation between a Christian and myself. The context for this portion of the conversation is that the Christian had asked me whether, if God had proven himself empirically to me, I would accept him.
I'm leaving the specific Christian anonymous.
Me: If God was good by my understanding, I would be ready to have a relationship with him.
Theist: -So, by your standards? Then it falls down to who is trying to please who here?
Me: If the only elements of this relationship are God commanding and me obeying, that is not a personal relationship. That is the relationship between a person and a thing, no more personal than the relationship between you and a spoon when you eat soup.
Theist: -Right.
Me: Good, so you agree with my challenging God's morality so that he can please me.
Now, that wasn't the end of the conversation and that last bit I included was me being a bit of a smartass. This was also a conversation in YouTube comments, which meant minutes at least between posts and other elements of the conversation contained within.
But, my point should be clear. By context, the second of my lines presented was an argument for why I should require God to satisfy me that he is good before I "accept a relationship" with him. That context was both completely clear and completely ignored.
Let's try another example. This wasn't online with minutes between posts to give one a chance to forget context. This one, albeit reconstructed from memory, was in person.
The context was me explaining why I was an atheist.
Me: When the priest told us to look inside ourselves and see that God was the part of us that made us love our fathers, I only saw it was me doing the loving.
Theist: That explains why we Christians love God. He is our father.
See the problem, there? And, no, I hadn't, prior in that conversation or in any conversation prior, expressed confusion over Christians loving God at all.
The Turing Test, also known as The Imitation Game, was a means of figuring out if you were talking to a pre-programmed machine or a person. A person is capable of creating new responses to new stimuli. The machine is limited to pre-programmed responses to pre-programmed stimuli, which means that it's going to mistake new stimuli for pre-programmed stimuli.
You've likely run your own kind of Turing Test whenever you called into any kind of customer service with an automated system.
To be clear, I'm not saying that Christian apologists or other theistic apologists are the only ones that have this problem. I am, however, saying that my lived reality is that this happens more often in conversations with apologists than it does in any other kind of conversation, and I'm including politics in that.
When you fail the Turing Test, you lose credibility. You deliver the message that you aren't dealing with an atheist or other non-Christian as an individual person, but as the embodiment of your prejudices. You deliver the message that you are not engaged in an actual conversation, but throwing out responses, nigh-mindlessly, with the expectation that one of those mindless responses will change their minds even as you fail to employ yours.
So, it's going to be up to you, if you really want to win hearts and change minds, to actually deal with the hearts and minds and contexts. Be careful to deal with ideas stated in context rather than key phrases and attempts to get points for some rhetorical scoreboard.
In short, be careful to have an actual conversation when you have a conversation.
I'm leaving the specific Christian anonymous.
Me: If God was good by my understanding, I would be ready to have a relationship with him.
Theist: -So, by your standards? Then it falls down to who is trying to please who here?
Me: If the only elements of this relationship are God commanding and me obeying, that is not a personal relationship. That is the relationship between a person and a thing, no more personal than the relationship between you and a spoon when you eat soup.
Theist: -Right.
Me: Good, so you agree with my challenging God's morality so that he can please me.
Now, that wasn't the end of the conversation and that last bit I included was me being a bit of a smartass. This was also a conversation in YouTube comments, which meant minutes at least between posts and other elements of the conversation contained within.
But, my point should be clear. By context, the second of my lines presented was an argument for why I should require God to satisfy me that he is good before I "accept a relationship" with him. That context was both completely clear and completely ignored.
Let's try another example. This wasn't online with minutes between posts to give one a chance to forget context. This one, albeit reconstructed from memory, was in person.
The context was me explaining why I was an atheist.
Me: When the priest told us to look inside ourselves and see that God was the part of us that made us love our fathers, I only saw it was me doing the loving.
Theist: That explains why we Christians love God. He is our father.
See the problem, there? And, no, I hadn't, prior in that conversation or in any conversation prior, expressed confusion over Christians loving God at all.
The Turing Test, also known as The Imitation Game, was a means of figuring out if you were talking to a pre-programmed machine or a person. A person is capable of creating new responses to new stimuli. The machine is limited to pre-programmed responses to pre-programmed stimuli, which means that it's going to mistake new stimuli for pre-programmed stimuli.
You've likely run your own kind of Turing Test whenever you called into any kind of customer service with an automated system.
To be clear, I'm not saying that Christian apologists or other theistic apologists are the only ones that have this problem. I am, however, saying that my lived reality is that this happens more often in conversations with apologists than it does in any other kind of conversation, and I'm including politics in that.
When you fail the Turing Test, you lose credibility. You deliver the message that you aren't dealing with an atheist or other non-Christian as an individual person, but as the embodiment of your prejudices. You deliver the message that you are not engaged in an actual conversation, but throwing out responses, nigh-mindlessly, with the expectation that one of those mindless responses will change their minds even as you fail to employ yours.
So, it's going to be up to you, if you really want to win hearts and change minds, to actually deal with the hearts and minds and contexts. Be careful to deal with ideas stated in context rather than key phrases and attempts to get points for some rhetorical scoreboard.
In short, be careful to have an actual conversation when you have a conversation.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-29 05:09 am (UTC)I can't help but notice after reading several of your evangelizing tips that your advice is very much tailored to the behaviors of specific kinds of Christians -- other religions either do very little evangelizing or do not use the same tactics -- but you refer to "theists" instead of Christians. This seems to me to be doing something quite similar to what you advise against here: it lumps all theists together while talking specifically about the behaviors of only a subset.
Not exactly damaging the way it is when a Christian behaves that way, but to other kinds of theist, kind of irritating. Especially when they turn these exact behaviors on us, too.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-29 05:21 am (UTC)So, I'm trying to try to expand the usefulness... but simultaneously doing that and refraining from lumping people together... that's a needle I'll have to do more work on threading.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-29 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-29 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-29 05:28 am (UTC)