Hark, and sorry this is so close to the day of:
My Philadelphia Brights Meetup Group is having a munch Monday (9 July) evening at 7, at the Barnes & Noble cafe at 1805 Walnut St., and my proposed topic is designing a popular tract to promote critical thinking. Why, after all, should we leave broadly accessible propaganda to the believers?
Now, I've seen some atheist tracts. The best known is probably "Kissing Hank's A--" (I censored the last word because of this board's rule against cursing). But I think that's really a couple shades too obvious, except maybe for people who are very close to becoming atheists anyway and just need a little validation to take the last step.
Better are some of the tracts devised by a group called the Robert Ingersoll Collective. I picked up a couple of these a few years ago at a music store, and think the one titled "Doctor God" is particularly good. It reviews some of the absurd "medical" advice found in the "Books of Moses" and contrasts these to real medical science, including some things that were within the means of that period, such as bread molds to fight infections, had there only been an omniscient being to tell people about them.
But what I'm really interested in is not so much disabusing people of a particular false belief, but rather helping them learn how to think for themselves in general. One approach might be to find concise accounts by people who used to hold ill-founded beliefs, presented in a way that illustrates how to critically examine one's own. Another tack could be to tell allegorical stories to illustrate the same point.
I encourage people to come to the munch and suggest their own ideas about how to do this. If you can't make it 9 July, perhaps you can come to the next one on 13 August, same time and place. You can RSVP at
http://brights.meetup.com/263.
Eric Hamell
Gondwanaland --
http://stripey7.blogspot.com