Hi, I'm Ali! My story is similar, only I used to be quite a strong fundamentalist muslim. I believed in the Ummah (i.e. the manifest destiny of the united Islam

Hi, I'm Ali! My story is similar, only I used to be quite a strong fundamentalist muslim. I believed in the Ummah (i.e. the manifest destiny of the united Islamic empire to eventually take over the world) and all the fun stuff in the appendices of the Quran and Hadith that 'moderate' muslims conveniently hand-wave away as something we're not supposed to take literally. My question for you is, is the method you're describing for making fundamentalists accept a more scientific world-view really effective? Did you leave religion because people shot down your beliefs or because you happened to read or listen to more scientific content on your own? For me, I was lucky enough to have some fantastically good teachers at school. Religious Education (which taught me about common arguments and problems with the god hypothesis) and Science was a double-whammy of input that more or less disabled any religious beliefs I had from the inside out. None of those teachers attacked my beliefs directly, they just gave me the intellectual tools to do it on my own. I'm not saying this approach will scale to the masses, but I will however suggest that there could be a more effective route to more rational/scientific thinking in general than just shouting out the answers to the hard questions at the top of our lungs.