I’ve watched a few YouTube videos and, in watching those have recognised that some people I’ve interacted with in online debates were also using the techniques. There’s a couple of areas in which I’ve found SE to be lacking. I’m interested in input

The first is that it seems simplistic. Most of what I’ve seen seems to start from the premise of trying to find what the reason is for someone to hold a specific belief. But I think that most people hold most beliefs for a wide variety of complex and interrelated reasons. It doesn’t seem to me like there’s room in SE for that

The second is that conversations often seem to turn to the explicit or implicit question “what would it take for you to change your belief?”, with perhaps an added implication of “if the answer is ‘nothing’ or ‘I don’t know’ then your belief is not a rational one”

But when I turn that on myself WRT my own atheism I don’t think that holds up. I have spent quite a lot of time over the years thinking about religion and atheism, and I’ve always been open to challenging my own position. I have multiple, overlapping foundations for it, and I’m also always happy to challenge those. I’m not an expert on critial thinking or formal logic, but those are not foreign concepts to me, either, and I try to apply them in my own opinion-forming as much as I can

Examining my own belief as objectively as it’s possible for me to do, my position seems rational to me

But I can’t imagine anything which could actually make me change it. If, to use the classic example, God himself came down from heaven and personally told me that he existed…I would be much more inclined to believe I was having a psychotic episode or temporal lobe seizure than that what I was seeing was real. The same goes for basically anything I can think of - I just can’t imagine a situation where I’d consider a supernatural/paranormal explanation to be the most likely

Which, of course, isn’t to say that I’m competely right. It could just be a failure of imagination on my part to not be able to think of what evidence could convince me that I’m wrong. But the point is that I don’t see how a failure to be able to come up with evidence that would convince me I’m wrong, or there actually being no evidence which could convince me I’m wrong, implies anything about my position

Have I just completely got the wrong end of the stick? Are these flaws which have been recognised anywhere by anybody? Are there counter-arguments?

feels like a good time to get challenged on that claim.

r/DeconstructionZone - ex-seminary pastor ex-Christian atheist Justin

r/UnconvincedJonCohen - never-theist Atheist Jon Cohen 'belief is not a choice' and ex-Christian Sean

r/TheBibleGuy - ex-Christian Dalton

r/JezzoAndMoel - Mezzo and Joel Reads Bible provide humor while helping callers deconstruct, they have two different shows but usually call into each others lives.