The ethics of breaking belief

each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.

This seems like an extremely strong statement and thus hardly believable. Many people would dearly love to discover such powerful secrets. Feel free to share an example or two.

tld: Well, God was there, and now he's left that world behind. So it's a world without God - what changes, what would be different about the world if God weren't in it?

J: I can't imagine a world without God in it.

I think you (and most commenters) are treating this hypothetical believer in a rather disrespectful and patronizing fashion. I would think the ethical thing to do is to engage in a meta-discussion with such a person and see whether there are certain subjects that are off limits, how they feel about your differing views on God, how they would feel about losing their faith, etc. They might ask you similar questions about what might make you become a believer. You might find yourself incorrect about what might make them lose their belief.

It's certainly possible to remain in a religious community without one's faith intact -- I think it happens to a large percentage of people in any religious group. Consider all the European Catholics who are essentially atheists.

Be honest (i.e. don't pretend to believe what you don't believe), don't be rude, don't be obnoxious and apart from that don't think too much about it. There will be both positive and negative consequences of whatever you tell the believers, the extent thereof you could hardly predict. If they want to discuss religion with a skeptic, let them take the responsibility to do so. If they don't, respect their choice.

Some ethically relevant questions you could ask yourself:

• If you deconvert your friend, do you predict they'll thank you for it afterward or express regret at losing their faith?

• Would you approve of your more adept friends pushing analogous levers in your own head? (For example, I welcome people to cause me to doubt my preconceptions, but I don't want people to use my fears to manipulate me.)

It really depends on your own personal moral system (assuming ethical relativism). In order to answer your question, I would need to know what you consider moral. I'll attempt to infer your morals from your post, and then I'll try to answer your question accordingly.

It sounds from your post like you're torn between two alternatives, both of which you consider moral, but which are mutually exclusive. On one hand, it seems that you're morally devoted to the causes of atheism and truth-seeking; thus, you desire to convert others to this cause. But on the other hand, you're morally devoted to your friends' happiness, and you realize that if they do become atheists, then they will lose their social grounding (not to mention the emotional benefits they receive from being religious).

It sounds like you're very devoted to truth-seeking, and that you believe atheism to be the truth. (Side-note: as a Bayesian, I distrust anyone who claims to know "the truth". The point of Bayesianism is that we don't know the truth; all we have are probabilities, and thus we can approach the truth but never attain it.) Anyway, given your devotion to truth-seeking, I would expect you to want to avoid Dark Arts-ish methods. If atheism is true, then we (and your Catholic friends) should want to believe that atheism is true, but we should want to believe it because of empirical evidence and rational argument, not based on the words of some authority figure (especially since authority figures have proven unreliable in the realm of religion).

If you deconvert your friends using Dark Arts-ish methods, but you don't teach them the virtues of truth-seeking, then atheism will become just another religion to them, handed down by new authority figures (you and "Science", for instance). They'll accept atheism in the same way they accepted religion: with blind faith. If your goal is truth-seeking, then you should want to teach your friends skepticism, not atheism. And if you're so interested in converting your friends to atheism that you would sacrifice the virtues of truth-seeking, perhaps you should re-examine your motivations.

You note that the God issue is a source of tension between you and your friends; thus, I suspect that you want your friends to be athiests because it would relieve social tensions, not because you are devoted to spreading the virtues of truth-seeking. Because you are considering using the Dark Arts, it seems to me that your appeal to truth-seeking is a rationalization. So what you're really asking is, "Is it moral to make my friends' lives very difficult in order to relieve a social tension that I find unpleasant?" Most moral systems would say "no".

Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair to you. Perhaps your true goal is to encourage truth seeking, but it's easier to convert atheists to truth-seekers than it is Catholics. Or perhaps you believe that atheism will make the world a better place by eliminating holy wars and other problems caused by religion. If that's the case, then I apologize for the harshness of this analysis. Also, fwiw, my personal moral system says that converting your friends to atheism would be wrong, so I'm likely to be biased. Take this (and everything else in life, of course) with a grain of salt, and good luck to you with whatever you decide to do. =)

The "Dark Arts-ish levers" are what make this situation interesting. If it were merely a matter of telling the truth, virtually every ethical theory would come out in favor of telling the truth. But having access to such levers is "Here, let me make this choice for you" and that puts you in murky ethical territory.

Some conditional answers from various points of view:

If pulling the lever makes the world rank higher according to your preferences, then pull it.

If both you and they would be better off if you pulled the lever, then pull it.

If your relationship with them properly entails your pulling of the lever, then break off the relationship or pull the lever.

If pulling the levers intersects with duties such that you should pull them, then pull them. If it intersects with duties such that you should not pull them, then don't pull them.

If all of the above criteria come out in the same direction, then you have a pretty definitive answer.

I trust that this answer is not below-average in terms of helpfulness of ethical advice.

This is something I think about a lot. We all know pure rhetoric is never going to deconvert someone, but a combination of "dark arts", emotional vulnerability, and personal connection seems a likely recipe.

A quick summation of how I feel about religiosity: I hate the belief, but love the believer. I went through a long and painful deconversion process, so I can empathize with them. I know that religious people struggle with doubt and are probably terrified by the prospect of losing their faith. I've had the chance to go for the throat (so to speak) several times, but never had the conviction to do so.

So I guess the question you have to ask, is, what are you offering them in return? Keeping in mind that they are probably more of a "normal" than you are, how is it going to effect their social and psychological well-being? Do you anticipate that changing that one belief will manifest itself in greater mastery of rationality, or even a glimpse of the path? Or are you just stealing a childs safety blanket and telling them to grow up?

The only other mitigating factor I can think of is "raising the sanity waterline", specifically by decreasing the overall population of virulent religious memes. But aren't there probably better and easier ways of doing so that don't involve randoms going through bleak existential withdrawl?

That's a serious question, I'm not settled on the issue at all either. Of course, there are some people who will just need a push, a friend to tell them it's ok. If they seem like they can thrive as an athiest, due to humanist values, being contrarian, courageously facing the truth, or whatever, I don't see why not.

And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.

Have you tried this? I've talked a number of people out of theism before, but even after observing and following deconversion extensively, I could never manage, nor would I expect, to be able to change the beliefs of most theists, using any of the persuasive techniques available to me.

You can't change everyone's minds. You won't, in all probability, manage to do so, even if you try. You will, of course, alienate yourself to everyone you try and fail with. If someone wants to discuss faith in a genuine way, it seems reasonable to argue with them. But I don't see the benefit in evangelising at people.

I am perhaps less optimistic than you on the probability that you can really deconvert theists by "unflipping DA levers in their heads"; but I'm positively absolutist on the desirability of doing so. The Dark Side is called 'Dark' for a reason. Where you see it operating, you have a positive moral duty to fight it if you can.

I can think of one situation where pulling the levers would be more 'good' than 'bad'.

Estimate each of their future influence on others - both span and depth. If you consider it 'high', then pull the lever. If you consider it 'low' (which might further correlate with lower IQ), then (tentatively) hold off.

One concern is whether the newly-minted atheist will subsequently prove to emself that black is white, and be killed in the next zebra crossing, as Douglas Adams put it.

For instance, if Alice is so taken with her newfound freedom from faith that she boasts loudly about it and gets herself disowned, expelled, and otherwise disadvantaged, that would kind of suck.

(I'm writing this before reading the comments) I to have a similar situation ,with my peers(public school though).

It sounds like you're going for a snap sort of break if it really seems the way to you I'd recommended finding which peers have been through social trauma first and 'break' them.

I'm attempting to 'break' my younger sister (who is the only one in her house who regularly attends church) and I'm succeeding. But, I'm going slowly and i intend to let her finally decided after being brought to the edge.