Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Category: atheism (page 17 of 17)

Hitchens on Falwell

18 May 2007 / / 4 Comments

Falwell’s death has made the world a better place, and in this clip Hitch gives an anti-eulogy.

Lots of intriguing thoughts here:

  • Do religious conmen really believe their schtick?
  • If you think religion is false but ‘teaches good moral values’ (as I have been guilty of thinking from time to time), then how moral is it to teach lies to children?
  • Why do religious beliefs so often get a pass when it comes to critical evaluation?

But the interesting thing for me: Did anyone notice Anderson Cooper’s use of ‘yeah, no’ at 3:33? This is typically regarded as Australian, but it could be spreading.

Why do people say ‘yeah, no’? Is the ‘yeah’ an agreement, and the ‘no’ a discourse particle? If so, what’s the ‘no’ doing? Is it to backtrack to an earlier part of the discourse? Does it start a new branch off the dialogue? At this point, I tend to think it’s there to anticipate disagreement, or to set up an imaginary opponent, and disagree with them to show that you’re following your listener.

More research needs to be done et cetera.

Deconversion stories: The way forward

11 May 2007 / / 5 Comments

I had occasion to chat with a student recently. He was raised in a religious family, but has realised that he doesn’t believe in any gods. The realisation has not been particularly easy. I got the feeling that, while he hadn’t believed for a long time, he was only just beginning to admit this to himself, and to solidify his identity as a non-believer. He seemed poised on the verge of some kind of decision about what to do next, and he was concerned about the effect that his deconversion would have on his family.

The first thing I did was to congratulate him on his sound reasoning and judgement! I also noted that we might have had some experiences in common. I had a deconversion ‘click moment’ about a year or so ago, but it was a long time in coming. While I identified very closely as a Mormon, I was also learning concepts about evidence, and how to evaluate ideas. As a result, I found that my religious knowledge was becoming less and less relevant. Rather than working my secular knowledge into my spirituality, I now found myself trying to defend my religious faith from the onslaught of remorseless reason, and these attempts seemed increasingly dishonest. At last I was able to consider the idea of the non-existence of gods, devils, spirits, and demons without panicking, and then to realise that the doctrine of theism was not well-supported, and very likely untrue.

There are some differences in our stories. For instance, the people in my life have taken my deconversion very well. I’m aware they don’t like the approach I’m taking to life, but they’re still my friends and family. I think it might be somewhat easier for them because I haven’t changed my behaviours — I still don’t smoke or drink, and the only commandments I disobey concern spending hours at church and giving the Church forkloads of money. For this student, it’s a different story. His religion ostracises its ex-believers, and it’s going to have an impact on the people closest to him. He’ll have to take a peripheral role in his social group, and perhaps in his family. They may cut him off. He may not see them again. And what a shame that would be. They’d be missing the chance to associate with a smart, great young person.

Why do we atheists put ourselves through it? Why not just go with the flow, keep our doubts to ourselves, and stay in the organisation? It’s not a bad life. They teach about being nice. Well, nice to other believers, at least. Maybe we’d eventually be able to deal with being slightly out of step with our peers — hey, some of us actually enjoy it. Why not just stay undercover and enjoy the benefits?

The first reason I’d suggest taking the road to deconversion is that when one sees the religion for what it is — a system that people have made up — association with believers becomes less tolerable. This was particularly true for me in a ‘Bible literalist’ church (which Mormons are, though not everyone sees it that way). People would swallow amazing amounts of nonsense if spoken from the pulpit. I remember going to a Sunday School lesson about Noah and the Flood (post-deconversion), and realising that I was surrounded by people who actually believed that Noah literally got all those animals on a literal ark. (I marvelled that once I’d literally believed it too.) At that point, the people of my former faith seemed like aliens to me. I wondered how it was that they could believe these fantastic things in the absense of any physical evidence at all. Perhaps it was that they believed in God, and if one can believe in a god that can do anything, all the rest could follow. But my standard of evidence was higher.

Could I have saved myself some trouble by taking the Flood as figurative, in a church of literalists? Only if I wanted to have a lifetime of arguments in Sunday School. Or shut up completely — but I’m not good at shutting up. Too frustrating. And if the Flood is figurative, what about the Creation? What about the Tower of Babel? The parting of the Red Sea? The miracles of Jesus? What about the Resurrection? Why couldn’t they be figurative too? And if they were figurative, then there might be no literal resurrection, and no life after death — just like atheism. So without literalism, the much-touted ‘comfort’ offered by religion evaporates. And literalism doesn’t last long when sound evidence is required. Nope — might as well save a step and not believe. It’s certainly cheaper and less time-consuming.

Another reason I chose to ‘go public’ with my lack of faith is that I’m trying to be a more honest person, and I thought that pretending to believe would be inauthentic. I view atheism as honest in the same way as science is honest: you observe facts as best you can, and try not to say more than the facts will tell you. And if the facts tell you something new, you have to stay open to it. I sometimes tell people that if some solid reproducible evidence of a god’s existence came to light, I’d happily become a believer again. I’m not holding my breath though.

The road for my student — and for any recovering believer — will not be easy, whichever way he may take. There are costs for not believing. For me, coming out as an atheist meant not participating in church ordinances. Baptism and priesthood ordinations are, to me, symbols with no eternal significance, but they can acquire significant social meanings. My dad performed both of those ordinances for me; if I don’t, am I abnegating my fatherly duties? And so a good friend baptised and ordained my sons this year, while I watched and realised that it had to be that way. It was what I chose when I decided to accept an evidence-based worldview.

While deconversion isn’t easy, it is possible, and it is worthwhile. You can think more clearly. You can make decisions based on how they’ll affect people without worrying about offending some shadowy being. You can teach your children how to evaluate ideas, which will serve them for the rest of their lives. You can overcome a lifetime of religious training, centuries of philosophies and social patterns, and millions of years of human evolutionary perceptual weirdness, using only your mind. I view my deconversion as my greatest intellectual acheivement to date (although it’s a small list).

Leaving the religion of my youth behind was challenging, but I’ve come through the other side of it okay. And I’m finding that being an atheist can be a noble and good thing to be.

Latest addition to the growing reading list

9 May 2007 / / 7 Comments

Funny how I hear a lot of people saying “I’m no fan of Hitchens, but…”

Yes, there’s a lot not to like about Christopher Hitchens. He was for the Iraq War, he acts boorish on chat shows, and one gets the impression that if he were to do the voicework on his own audiobooks, half of it would be incomprehensibly slurrred.

But the guy writes like a champ, and so I’m glad to see him add his weight to the recent wave of New Atheist books. Check the Slate excerpt from ‘God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the “meaning” of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what “he” demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude “belief” from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

The other excepts, in which he deals with Islam and Mormonism summarily, are worth a read.

God: Did I miss anything?

18 April 2007 / / 3 Comments

Though I’m not really following the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy, bits of it are leaking into the Australian news. I’m sort of absorbing it from an Australian perspective. I’m guessing that this event will not reignite the gun debate in America in any long term way — the power of the NRA and the reluctance of the American left has ensured the gun debate’s been canned for the next twenty years, no matter how many people get shot. I watch and wonder if America will ever learn to stop this.

I don’t know what to do about gun violence. Crazy people get guns. It even happened in Australia once. Once. But contrast that to the grim regularity with which these stories come out in the USA. The theme of ‘gun rampage/closed-room slaughter/suicide’ has become a script, an American story that grows with each retelling.

As a believer, I used to respond to the problem of evil by explaining that God refused to curtail our agency. If we decided to kill a hundred people, it was allowed so that we’d be justly judged by our actions in the hereafter. It didn’t occur to me that God was a being that could see the future and already knew what we were going to do.

Now that explanation seems unsatisfactory. I imagine what kinds of events would take place if there were no supreme intervening being, and it looks like… well, pretty much like what’s going on right now.

Still, this doesn’t stop a dissembling ferret like Dinesh D’Souza, whose blog features the most invitingly punchable face in all conservativedom, from wondering how athiests deal with the problem of evil.

Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen?

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing.

Notice something interesting about horrible tragedies in progress? God is nowhere to be found. Sure, people talk about God afterwards. Talk and talk and talk.

What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.

Fine. What has he got to offer? A magical man who finds car keys and parking spots, but is eternally late for real emergencies. An absent father. A failed superhero.

So D’Souza finds science less comforting than stories about heaven. Fair enough. It probably is in some ways. But an idea is not true in proportion to its comfortingness. Part of becoming an adult is learning to deal with some pretty bleak truths, and Christianity (and theism) forestalls that part of our development by offering baseless fluffy stories.

D’Souza thinks atheists have a problem that they need to explain. I think theists do. The real issue is bigger than ‘where is God during shootings’. It’s this: Why does the universe consistently fail to show the kinds of things that we should be seeing if theism were true?

Hero of the Week: Pete Stark

13 March 2007 / / Comments Off on Hero of the Week: Pete Stark

US Congressperson Pete Stark (D-Ca) has become the first open atheist in Congressional history. Or should we say ‘nontheist’?

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a member of Congress since 1973, acknowledged his nontheism in response to an inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America. Rep. Stark is a senior member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and is Chair of the Health Subcommittee.
…
Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, attributes these attitudes to the demonization of people who don’t believe in God. “The truth is,” says Silverman, “the vast majority of us follow the Golden Rule and are as likely to be good citizens, just like Rep. Stark with over 30 years of exemplary public service. The only way to counter the prejudice against nontheists is for more people to publicly identify as nontheists. Rep. Stark shows remarkable courage in being the first member of Congress to do so.”

Indeed. Atheists are the scary monsters of the political scene. Notice how dirty a word ‘atheist’ is. That has to stop. (So does that annoying reference to the Golden Rule. It’s playing into their frame, like saying ‘Look! We can be just as righteous as Christians, the ones who own goodness and light!’ In fact the behavioral differences are minimal.)

Visibility is the key to ending the pariah status of atheists. Pete Stark has opened the door in Congress, and for that, he’s Good Reason’s Hero of the Week.

Open Thread for family members re: Daniel’s atheism

2 March 2007 / / 4 Comments

Since I’ve already come out as an atheist to my family members, you wouldn’t think the contents of Good Reason would be much of a surprise to them. However, at least one has reacted with dismay as the extent of my rejection of theism has become apparent.

So this is an open thread where family members who have recently found the blog can chat, discuss, fulminate, or cajole. Other readers are also invited to share their experiences (from either side) of family and faith or non-faith.

I’ll start.

When people identify closely with a religion that emphasises family, the rejection of the shared values of the religion seems to entail a rejection of family. Allow me to assure you that this is not the case. I love you guys, and I’m grateful to have the family I do. My decision to follow the evidence instead of feelings has not been an easy one. However, as I’ve come to understand the frailty of human perception and the workings of reason, I’m convinced that the evidence as we have it points overwhelmingly to a lack of gods. I’m aware that this view has caused some pain to my Mormon family members, who view religion as the way to return to God and live together as a family forever. But I’m confident in saying that, on the pain scale, no one has been more affected than myself, as I have abandoned a belief system that I had faithfully followed and invested heavily in all my life. At the same time, being an ethical atheist is a noble thing, and part of a long and honourable tradition. I can explain things I couldn’t before. The candle of reason is small, but it shines brightly, and illuminates warmly.

Feel free to share your thoughts and feelings by clicking on the ‘number of comments’ link.

Would you vote for an atheist?

20 February 2007 / / 5 Comments

Dead last. This must not stand.


Muslims aren’t listed because they actually went into negative territory. Which actually can happen; someone says ‘no’ with such vehemence that it negates other people’s ‘yes’ votes and then some. Happened in Ohio, too.

But how come there’s no category: alcoholic with a criminal record? What would they score? Obviously between 49-51 percent.

A few reasons, perhaps. Atheists have been the Scary Monsters of the American political scene for fifty years. Everyone can dump on them with impunity. And why not? No one knows any atheists. Or if you do, they just tell you that your beliefs are made up, and who likes that? They have no morals, except for the ones they catch by osmosis from Christians. Plus they’re angry. Angry! Grrrrrr.

Wow, I’d scarcely vote for myself! Too scary!

UPDATE: I realised that ‘alcoholic with a criminal record’ doesn’t really cover Bush because the question said ‘generally well-qualified’. My bad.

The angry atheist

4 February 2007 / / 5 Comments

Off a tip from snowqueen, I’ve been watching the Mr Deity videos on YouTube. Wickedly funny! I had no idea that God was like a Hollywood executive. But suddenly a lot of things make sense. ‘Mr Deity’ is occasionally scathing, as though written by someone who’s heard all the lame rationalisations for God’s inaction.

And so I wasn’t surprised to learn this from Mr Deity’s FAQ.

Brian, what is your stand on Religion?
I am a formerly religious person (non-bitter), and as such, have great sympathies for the beliefs and feelings of religious people.

The first and great commandment is: Thou shalt not be bitter.

But notice:

In future episodes, I intend to turn the tables a bit and poke fun at what I call the “angry atheists” (of whom I am not fond). We’ll see if they take it so well.

And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt not be angry.

I suspect that this is a stereotype we’re going to see for the next several decades: The Angry Atheist. Too bad it’s being promoted by a funny satirist like Mr Deity. It was pulled out by Fox News asshat John Kasich, who angrily asked a smiling Brian Flemming (of Blasphemy Challenge fame) why he was so angry. Are we going to have to walk around with big fake churchy smiles on our faces, just so we can debunk this meme?

But maybe this is a good chance to address the Anger Issue. Richard Dawkins was once mystified during a talk when someone asked him if he thought anger was a natural part of the deconversion process. He wasn’t sure, so he turned the question back on the audience, who responded resoundingly: Yes.

Yes, we are angry. I am angry. Why shouldn’t I be? I have wasted hours and years of my life on a flimsy set of ideas that claimed to be true. I’ve paid thousands of dollars to a religious organisation that promoted fiction. I knocked on doors for two years of my limited life in the hope of convincing someone of a set of absurdly stupid beliefs. I testified that these beliefs were true for the very worst reason: I had had a feeling that they were true.

While I’m thinking about it, allow me to take this opportunity to make an apology. People of Perth, Australia: I am sorry that I ever troubled you for one second about religion, the fictional plan of salvation, and made-up gods and scriptures. In a small way, it’s a comfort that so few of you believed me.

And yet, who am I angry at?

My parents? Not really; they were fooled too. They were just trying to do their best, and get me to heaven where we could live as a family forever, la lee la lee la.

Myself? I feel like I should have figured it out sooner. But I was given shitty tools to find truth. And it’s hard to overcome years of training, especially when you’ve received (as you suppose) a message from God confirming everything. And invested so much in it. So I guess I did figure it out eventually, when it was difficult. In a way, I’m actually sort of pleased with myself.

People who still believe? I confess to a flash of ire now and again that people can still be theists, but that’s because I sometimes forget what it was like, and how hard it was to change. When I remember that, I can forgive them for continuing.

I’ve heard that one of the important psychological jobs of adulthood is to be able to forgive your parents for their failings. I’ve seen twenty- and thirty-somethings that still burn with rage over things their parents did, and that’s not healthy. In like manner, it’s important to forgive your religion of origin (and the people therein) for promoting the God delusion.

Angry atheists: your anger is real and justified. Now sort it out, and be healthy. Fight theism with relentless cold reason.

Coming out

21 January 2007 / / 7 Comments

I finally came out to my Mom and sister. As an atheist, that is. I’ve noticed that atheists use the term ‘come out’ like gay people do. The comparison is apt. In both cases, you’re confessing something shocking! secret! and socially undesirable. You know your family will be disappointed, and wonder what they could have done differently. And in both cases, there’s really very little you can do to change your orientation. You could fake it, of course, and some people do, but what a waste of your life.

Here’s what family members do when you tell them you don’t believe in God.

They are floored. Then they babble for a minute, asking questions like “Do you think we just evolved? Don’t you know that Satan is working through science? Dad would be rolling over in his grave!” and so on. You can tell they’re thinking, “If I can just say the right thing, then he’ll feel something, and believe again. Now’s my chance! What do I say?” Because of course, what really matters is whether you feel something’s true.

Then they relax a bit and start asking questions. I tried to listen, and answer gently, and be supportive.

“What about all those spiritual experiences on your mission?”
Hey, I’ve had lots of ‘spiritual experiences’, not just on the mission. But experiences are anecdotal, and good data isn’t. A feeling means you had a feeling, not that some spiritual being exists.

“You know, Satan is really working hard, trying to lead people astray.”
What’s that you say? I’m in the grip of an invisible spirit being that may not exist! Oh noes!!!!!!111111!!!!!1one!1 Okay, I admit it was hard to respond to meathead comments like this one gently.

“Are you going to try and lead others away from the Church?”
This was particularly galling. If you believe in all that, you’re meant to shout it from the housetops, but if you believe the opposite, suddenly you’re just supposed to shut the fuck up. Well, a lifetime of evangelism has had its effect, and yes, I will continue to influence people to understand about good evidence, and I will teach critical thinking in my classes, and I’ll be right here on the blog, telling it like it appears to be.

“Well, at least you’re not going to become an atheist, are you?”
I am not kidding, Mom said this. “Well, Mom,” said I, “if you don’t believe in God, an atheist is what you are.” Oh.

The most telling thing was something that both Sis and Mom said. Sis said, “Well, then, what’s the point in all this? Why do you think we go through all this horrible stuff in life?”

I was surprised. “Is life horrible?” I asked.

“Yeah, it really is,” she said. “If I didn’t think I was going on to something better, I don’t know how I’d get through it.”

Atheists are sometimes criticised for saying that there’s no point in life, something I have never heard a real atheist say. It’s true that what we do as individuals really matters very little on the cosmic scale. But my life has a point for me because I give it a point. The only people I hear saying that life on earth isn’t very important is Christians. And, given their assumptions, it makes sense. Compared to eternity, life is just a jot. So why would it matter as long as you get to heaven? Fortunately, most believers act as though they don’t actually believe this, otherwise there’d be an awful mess, no one painting their houses, people plundering the earth’s resources, blowing themselves up for their religion — oh, wait.

Mom said much the same thing. “If I didn’t think Dad was up there waiting for me, I just couldn’t go on.”

And that’s when I thought maybe I was wasting my time saying anything. It’s not like she’s going to change. Some paradigm shifts can drive people insane. And when your worldview or your self-image depends on not understanding, you will not understand. It really gave me an insight into the desperation about life that religious people feel. But it’s not just desperation. It’s hatred. I remembered all those lessons in church about staying unspotted from the World. Don’t get any of the World on you. Hymns describing the earth as a ‘vail of tears’. That’s the view of someone who doesn’t really like life.

Finally Mom said, “Well, the important thing is that you’re a Good Person. And I know you are because of the way you take care of those boys, and the way you live your life.” It seemed important to Mom that I was still a Good Person. I guess I always had the same misconception as she did; that people who break from the Church turn into drug-taking Satanists. But she realised that I had an internalised moral code. So, good for Mom.

I finished my calls with each of them. If I’d called either of them right after that, I’m sure both of their phones would have been busy. And now my open secret’s out. It feels good.

Believe what you like.

8 January 2007 / / 28 Comments

Doesn’t it seem like atheism is all over the news? I’m probably falling victim to some form of perceptual bias here, possibly selective perception — like the time when I bought a solid gold baby, and suddenly it seemed like everyone had one. Okay, so either I’m imagining it, or else I became an atheist at the exact time that atheism began to command an unprecedented amount of media coverage. I think the latter — I’m on the crest of a trendy atheist wave!

A lot of the recent articles are from people who aren’t happy about the trend. They liked it when atheists wouldn’t tell people… much of anything… just felt guilty about not believing, and kept to themselves. Now we’re militant totalitarians! Cool! When do we get the uniforms?

It’s sad to see theists turn to blather so abjectly, but I suppose it’s inevitable. Without facts to support them, they have to take issue with the way atheists present their case: atheists are ‘arrogant’ or ‘dogmatic’, or, irritatingly, members of a ‘religion’.

One debate that I keep seeing is this: aren’t atheists turning off moderate theists by being confrontational? Sure, Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are going after the fundamentalist believers, but aren’t they also alienating religious moderates who would have been likely to slide into the disbelieving camp but for the nasty atheists?

Well, atheists aren’t all that mean, though people do sometimes feel confronted when I get started. Science is like that (and so is truth and so is life). But more to the point: The conflict is not between religious fundamentalism and religious moderation. The conflict is between people who think you can believe what you like, and people who don’t. I could have said ‘between religion and science’, but I think saying it the other way neatly encapsulates the problem.

Some people think that you can believe what you like, as long as you feel ‘good’ about it, or it makes you ‘happy’. These are religious fundamentalists, but it also describes religious moderates and the entire spectrum of new age woos. People who ‘do science’ or ‘accept science’ are different. If you have a scientific outlook, you can’t believe just what you want. There’s an external reality independent of anyone’s perception that can be measured and experimented on, and evidence from that reality is the standard for truth.

A theist on another blog asked this thought-provoking question:

What are your thoughts on interaction with and influence by those of different beliefs/ideals? Do you feel easily influenced when you open yourself up to their opinions? Do you see this as detrimental or beneficial?

And here’s part of my response:

I guess my message for True Believers would be: Don’t worry. Exposure to other beliefs won’t necessarily change your mind, especially if changing your mind would be especially threatening. You’ll be able to revert to whatever you want to believe. People are good at that. … As long as you hold on to the idea that you can believe what you like, your beliefs are safe.

What you should worry about, in my view, is science and reason. Reject those, and you can believe what you like. Accept them as valid, and you can’t. Once you are aware of critical thinking and the scientific method and you decide to apply them to your life, including your belief system, without being afraid of the consequences, then — in my view — loss of faith is the likely outcome. It just so happens that I now think that’s the right answer, but it’s not an easy one to accept.

Reason’s a bully, and once you accept its validity, you can no longer honestly deny facts. No wonder then that many belief systems avail themselves of some variant of ‘believe what you like’, ‘believe what feels good’, or ‘create your own reality’.

UPDATE There’s a really good interview on Salon with Chris Hedges, author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

Doesn’t it make sense for the Democrats to reach out to the huge number of evangelicals who aren’t necessarily part of the religious right, but who may be sympathetic to some of its rhetoric? Couldn’t those people be up for grabs?

I don’t think they are up for grabs because they have been ushered into a non-reality-based belief system. This isn’t a matter of, “This is one viewpoint, here’s another.” This is a world of magic and signs and miracles and wonders, and [on the other side] is the world you hate, the liberal society that has shunted you aside and thrust you into despair. The rage that is directed at those who go after the movement is the rage of those who fear deeply being pushed back into this despair, from which many of the people I interviewed feel they barely escaped. A lot of people talked about suicide attempts or thoughts of suicide — these people really reached horrific levels of desperation. And now they believe that Jesus has a plan for them and intervenes in their life every day to protect them, and they can’t give that up.

So in a way, the movement really has helped them.

Well, in same way unemployed workers in Weimar Germany were helped by becoming brownshirts, yes. It gave them a sense of purpose. Look, you could always tell in a refugee camp in Gaza when one of these kids joined Hamas, because suddenly they were clean, their djelleba was white, they walked with a sense of purpose. It was a very similar kind of conversion experience. If you go back and read [Arthur] Koestler and other writers on the Communist Party, you find the same thing.

People who believe what they like are easy to manipulate. It just takes an influential and charismatic con artist to show them a vision they like, and they’re in.

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