livius drusus

They aren't about critical thinking per se, but from Cliff Walker's Positive Atheism site these handbills might be of use to you:

National Bible Week Poster
Which Ten Commandments?

sakrilege

FFRF nontracts

pariah

PG, you might want to get some scientific rebuttals ready. There is a chick tract I was looking at the other day where the basically flat out lie about carbon 14 dating...i actually made a thread about it.

Maybe find the most common "proofs" against evolution and if you dont know the refutation find it?

Iono, what i would do. good luck ;]

WinAce

This is where I plug my Questioning Theistic Beliefs article.

Also, be sure to find some stuff on all their failed end-times lunacy and print it out.

girlwriter

Try to have a birthday party for your kids goin' on when they get there so she can see what she's missing. I'm sure your four year-old would love the extra non-birthday!

Good luck, but don't expect a miricle. You might get a few minutes in front of this girl compared to probably thousands of hours with the JW cult. Just do your best and plant the seed.

Edited to add:
Oh yeah, and NICE! I'm very impressed. Sounds like you had her pretty solidly outclassed.

Marruk

I was thinking maybe just a book on logic. I took a critical thinking philosophy class and the book we had had nothing to do with religion, just arguments. I think that if she just knew how to form and deconstruct and argument, she would eventually do the same with her religion and see that many things contradict themselves. I dont remember the name of the book that we had, and I sold mine back to the book store, but it was very small and very easy to read, with lots of examples. Maybe if you first use logic to discredit say a tv advertisement, you can then use the same logic to discredit parts of the religion. Why would the use of logic be any less valid when applied to the religion? Maybe she will see that? Just a thought.

Rhea

I particularly like this letter from Richard Dawkins to his daughter "Good and Bad Reasons to Believe"

http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines.../dawkins2.html


You did a great job!

faust

You are all missing the most important question! is this "julie" cute?!! ;D

I agree with the above, but nearly the same thing happened to me in the coffee shop with two scientologist women, the older one was outright hostile but the younger (less indoctrinated) one was much more open. They asked if they could return with more info.. It's been a few weeks and they haven't shown up :/
I don't think they will either, i'm too dangerous to the younger girl, might deprogram her.

BrotherMan

Wow, PG, way to hold true. I'm always impressed with stories like this.

DamagedGoods

I have a couple of cents to pitch in here; take them for what they're worth. Most of the stuff I've read about helping people get out of cults seems to put much more emphasis on a subtle approach, since most groups make an effort to teach their members to recognize and deal with direct confrontation.

It seems the best situation is when you can talk to the person alone, without other group members around to exert peer pressure. That's usually why some groups don't let their members go anywhere unaccompanied if at all possible. But I would say that even if all you have opportunity to do is to show the young kid what a bumbling, fumbling fool their senior mentor can be when faced with real questions they can't dodge, then that might do some good as well.

I would think that books or websites would be good tools to 'infect' someone with some sense, provided that the person in question (1) has some level of trust in you, and (2) has enough privacy to be able to stash a book somewhere or view a website without someone looking over their shoulder. Then they have something for their brain to chew on in those times when there might not be much going on.

My mom sent me a book about cults while I was still in a fundie group, and it helped to see descriptions of other groups that were cults; it was easier to pronounce judgment on some group that wasn't mine, and later on I started to notice that my group was just as screwed up as those "other people." I had already started to recognize the "screwed-upness" of the group, but being able to recognize my group as a cult just accelerated my departure.

I can go dig around in my bookcase and find some ISBNs for you later on if you'd like some specific book info.