Vorkosigan

The path to skepticism from belief is generally different from the path to conversion. As Toto says, conversion is a social act, while loss of faith tends to be a private one. You can peruse thousands of testimonies on the web, few indeed tell how they were deconverted by skeptics.

Vorkosigan

Clivedurdle

The Taichi class I attend has recently changed instructor. I have not reacted well to the new guy, and I raised this with a fellow student, thinking it was a personal reaction by me - the guy reminds me of an evangelical relative...

I was very surprised by the response - oh no, everyone is feeling like that, he is supercilious!

Discussing this further, someone commented that there might a shaman personality.

We all have the existential problem, we are here, what do we do? Lot's of us follow the traditions of others, and some are very skilled at pretending they know the way, when the reality is everyone is as blind as everyone else and a sensible way forward is to discuss it!

Lee Strobel and this taichi instructor are being too assertive - there are actually only four things we can be certain about - death, taxes, that we invented gods and we have to work it out ourselves!

What is amusing is that as I understand the point of taichi it is for everyone to work it out themselves using the experience of someone!

outhouse

Sources for that research please

Toto

The pioneering research was conducted by John Lofland and Rodney Stark "Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective" American Sociological Review, 1965, based on field research on converts to the Unification Church. Stark later applied his insights to early Christianity in the book The Rise of Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk).

Similar result have been found with other religion conversions that have been studied, especially Mormonism.

outhouse

I thought something smelled fishy. Stark is a oddball, but his work there has merit.

Dont ever get in a debate about evolution with him :facepalm:

Toto

Please stop throwing out casual insults.

Stark's earlier work as a sociologist was peer reviewed. He claimed to be a religious agnostic at the time. There is nothing fishy there. My own and others' personal experience jibes with what he found - people decide to join a religion or a cult or some other group for basically social reasons, and then learn how to rationalize their decision.

Even more current brain research shows that people make decisions on many matters, and then form a rationalization, to convince themselves that their decision was right. It's part of the human condition.

Much later in Stark's career, he was offered a prestigious position at Baylor, for which he had to be a Christian. Amazingly, he decided that he was a Christian.

Anything he says on evolution is outside his area of expertise and outside the subject matter of this forum.

aa5874

How can you say such a thing? If Strobel claimed he investigated before he decided to believe then I am at a loss how you would be able to show that he did not.

Typical patterns for conversions have nothing at all to do with Strobel's claim.

Are you implying that all conversions are typical?

Adam

One would think aa is trying to be humorous here, as we would with anyone else. But we all know aa has no sense of humor.
If aa is trying to be humorous here, he is more funny when he is not trying to be humorous

Toto

You are at a loss, then. We know Strobel's story - that he drank too much, and then his wife became a Christian, and he thought it was good for her. And we can see that his "investigation" was not conducted in any scholarly or skeptical manner.

aa5874

Please, it is irrelevant whether ot not Strobel drank too much. Perhaps it can be argued that he did not do a proper investigation but to assert that Strobel's claim that he did an investigation is false cannot be corroborated.