If “the actual human beings” are indoctrinated beyond any chance of redemption, who says I need to keep trying?
Honestly, you probably shouldn’t try. You seem like you are in a bad place at present to attempt to do so. If you do attempt your first motive should not be to change someone else but to do so for yourself.
Harboring an active grudge can be embittering. The brain is plastic. You can over many iterations of leaving the emotion and stimuli connection unchecked can reinforce it and strengthen the connection beyond what logic can undo. It can be unhealthy. A lot of traumatized atheists, or those who continually allow themselves to reinforce that religious people are inferior humans in a meaningful way, can be quite harmful in pluralistic spaces because they become blinded to the line between religious people existing and religious oppression in the exact same way a lot of religious people do. When you allow that to happen it means that religion is still controlling you. If it can hammer your emotional buttons whenever it’s present and make you feel attacked just for being around it that is power that owns you. The further down that path you travel the harder it is to undo.
The ability to gain distance and a level of neutrality is actual freedom. It makes dealing with religion feel less personal and gives more space to react in a wider range of ways. The righteousness of perceiving yourself as justified in an overreaction is seductive. You want to bite back harder than you were bit…But every time you do you lose a little bit more of your objectivity. There is a freedom in letting go.
The freedom you’re advocating is the freedom to continue letting religious people to cause damage without obstacles and without feeling complicit about it.
No. It’s the freedom to engage with them without acting like you’re an abused dog reacting at every man in a hat.
I am trans. My advocacy has involved engaging with people who hate that I exist and who are primed to think that I am mentally ill, a logistical problem or that I am a moral threat. I have minor religious trauma myself though I know a lot of my fellows who suffer aggregious mental health problems because of religious trauma due to their parents. Some queer people still believe in that Christian God and detangling that trauma takes a lot of gentle work. I have been learning how to engage debate and advocate with religious people on different levels to de-escalate the harm being done as a matter of long term survival plans. Every person requires different tactics. Being scornful or rough can be used as a goad in the tool kit because some people need to be approached in ways they recognize as authoritative but more often then not it’s the tool likeliest to lose ground rather than gain it.
Recognizing the values they have is the first step to getting them to recognize you which is the first step to them re-evaluating what they believe. They have to feel understood and seen before there is a chance they will offer that to you. And sometimes they will snap as a fear response to their veiws being changed but will feel bad for that response later when they don’t have their back up against the wall. It’s a process and some of that processing happens when you aren’t around. If you leave on a note where their take away is “fuck that person is an asshole” they aren’t going to spend that time reflecting on their own bad actions. They are going to reflect on yours.
They have to feel understood and seen before there is a chance they will offer that to you.
They need to discard magical thinking and bad reasoning. The trauma, they can deal with their therapist.