Reddit reviews The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True

Hey look, the outsider test of faith.

I think that if she can learn to critically examine her own thinking and beliefs, and understand how and why people come to believe what they believe, that this will definitely be more effective than addressing just the factual problems.

Here are some book recommendations that I think can accomplish this, if she's willing to read them:

Why We Believe What We Believe - Newburg and Waldman
Mistakes Were Made - But Not By Me - Tavris and Aronson
The Outsider Test for Faith - John Loftus

I have a section on this in a PDF I recently wrote: Examining Church Claims

But take your time; pushing things will only create more resistance.

Good luck!

Knowing that brilliant people believe was one of the things that kept me in the faith for a very long time. I really get that "who am I to judge" inner voice.

What helped was getting the opportunity to question those I deemed most brilliant, and discovering something shocking. The smarter you are, the more convoluted your defenses of things can get.

I found amongst the brightest a few strains.

Most of them had abstracted God into something very remote from the Judeochristian mainstream. He is an idea, he is unknown and unknowable, the stories about him are metaphor, man's grasping attempt to reach out and touch the untouchable. I think this makes it possible for you to be aware of the vast volumes of evidence against Gods in general, and the specific Christian God in particular, and yet feel it's ok because it's part of the mystery. They were perhaps better classed as Deists, but staying in the community they were in and playing along.

Some, but fewer, of them had found a way to reject the findings of science (at least in the areas that conflicted with them) completely, because of some version of God's Ways Are Higher Than Ours and We Can't Understand Them. They willfully remained ignorant of much of the historical/textual/archeological/scientific evidence because those are Lies of Atheistic people who are Afraid To Obey God so their ideas should be ignored.

And one very sad one was struggling with a fatal disease, and clinging to this belief for comfort.

Nobody was able to give me a simple explanation for why to believe. They either weren't aware of the evidence, couldn't address the evidence, or they way they did made it so abstract that you might as well believe anything.

If you can find someone whose intellect you admire and ask them why they believe, you might find it's for reasons like this, and that might help let this go.

The ultimate stopper for me is what /u/xlightbrightx said; brilliant people believe all kinds of crazy, incompatible things. Indoctrination is powerful. If you want a very comprehensive guide through this line of thinking check out The Outsider Test For Faith. It's unreasonable for you to wake up afraid of hell and not also be afraid of, e.g., being reincarnated as a cockroach. You were just indoctrinated with one fear and not the other.

>This year, I made it my mission to understand and implement the teachings of Napoleon Hill and then teach it to others.

You left out the part between implementing it and teaching it to others where you confirm that it works. You seem committed to teaching it to others before you have observed personally that it works, so your plan might lead to you spreading lies.

Napoleon Hill's belief system is a type of magic, that is, claims about cause and effect without any plausible mechanism that could really connect them. "Magic Ladder to Success" literally has "Magic" in the title. Magical thinking is considered a sign of psychosis. The problem with magical thinking it is that it is a-priori implausible; it is structured in a way that discourages doing systematic experiments; and it is structured in a way that disrupts the objectivity of the person doing it so they are not in a position to determine whether it is true or false.

Religions are fundamentally about doing magic. No one religious belief has a majority, so most believers in magic are wrong. The evidence is also consistent with all of them being wrong. If you're going to work in this area, you have to be very clear how you are doing something different from the other magic users, since most of them are wrong.

If you learn to do magic, that's great. Figure out how to do experiments with it, publish a physics paper proving that it works, and get a Nobel prize. Many parapsychologists have failed before you.

It is irrational to put a large fraction of one's wealth into a risky investment even when that investment has expected positive return. Therefore you want to have a huge pile of money, or a large group of financially supportive people who are not concurrently experimenting with the same type of magic, before you start. If you aren't up to trying something that risky, don't bother trying to do magic.

The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True.

"Do unto your own faith what you do to other faiths." Apply the same skepticism to your own beliefs as you do to the beliefs of other faiths.

edit: added link

Couple things here.

You're describing the same idea as what John W. Loftus called the Outsider Test for Faith: “Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating."

Your former missionary companion seems to be applying Pascal's Wager to Mormonism, without realizing that if Pascal was right to propose this, that means Mormonism had to be false (since Pascal was a Christian, which is at odds with Mormonism). But Pascal was wrong.

Pascal's Wager fails to tell us which God is the right one, and it certainly does not tell us how to please this Being. For all he knows, God gave man reason and then hid Himself from man to test them to see if they would use the reason God gave them to conclude God doesn't exist, thus freeing mankind to develop moral frameworks based in reason, which would please this God. So in this scenario God would reward atheists and punish theists for their rejection of God's gift of reason in favor of faith. Another scenario is that the true God is not known to anyone on Earth and whenever people worship another God it just makes the true God angrier and angrier.

There's also the minor point that if God requires belief then the person using Pascal's Wager isn't providing a genuine faith, but is trying to game the system to cover their own ass "just in case." I doubt God, if such a being existed, would take kindly to this approach since people are trying to use a false faith to trick God into rewarding them for their feigned commitment.

Plus, there is a real downside. Sure, we will all eventually become worm food but between now and then we can either be prisoners to a false religion or live free to achieve our best life. So wasting the one life you've got for a what-if religion is not a costless gamble.

You pretty much came to the outsider test for faith on your own. Well done!

You question wouldn't happen to have been inspired by this book would it?

You might start here for more tools that you and your family can use to understand where you are.

https://smile.amazon.com/Outsider-Test-Faith-Which-Religion/dp/1616147377?sa-no-redirect=1

Good luck.

> I believe there is a God

> I believe he has communicated with people

Does your evidence for these two claims pass the outsider test for faith? That is, if someone else presented you with this evidence for a faith other than your own, would you believe in that faith? I find this question is easier with a faith that no one believes in, so here's an example:

Someone comes up to you and claims that Elvis wasn't human, is alive, and communicates with people. He presents you with evidence equivalent to the evidence you use to justify your beliefs in God and his communication (old book, many other believers, feels Elvis's presence in their life, people have suffered for their belief, just the right song at just the right moment, "prime rocker" argument, whatever it is that reinforces your belief.) Do you now believe Elvis is a nonhuman entity who still lives and communicates with people? Or do you doubt some or all of that claim?

There is a very good book which I recommend. What you are briefly outlining is the very attitude we should have while dealing with faiths.

https://www.amazon.com/Outsider-Test-Faith-Which-Religion/dp/1616147377

https://www.amazon.com/Outsider-Test-Faith-Which-Religion/dp/1616147377

For anyone looking for a logical resource to take a skeptical, comprehensive, step-by-step look at any God or faith, The Outsider Test for Faith is a great resource.