Emotionally satisfying persuasion: Is it the best choice for someone who values a morality founded in empathy?

In a recent post by Dr. Richard Carrier entitled A Simple Thought Experiment That Destroys Plantinga’s Free Will Defense of Evil, he spoke of a "Mic Drop" moment created by a persuasive technique used by Matt Dillahunty:

Imagine our world, and an alternative one identical in every way (every single way), but one: in that world, the Biblical God consistently condemns slavery (rather than consistently endorses and even occasionally commands it), complete with reasons why His People must never practice it and instead always morally condemn it. In which world is that God more moral? There is no honest way around the answer: the non-existent God is more moral. Which entails any existent God cannot be moral. Mic drop. You’re done.

Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful.

When I read this, my immediate reaction was to nod my head in agreement. Indeed, it is emotionally satisfying, at least for the person dropping the mic and perhaps for the section of the audience who already agrees with you, the part who needs no persuading. 

For the person who just got the mic dropped on them, however, it is painful. This pain is not merely an unfortunate byproduct of this rhetorical strategy Part of the goal of this strategy itself is to induce suffering in the person against whom you are arguing, and perhaps that part of the audience who agrees with the person with whom you are arguing.

The primary target of this strategy is neither the people who already agree with you, nor the people who disagree with you in a way that this approach causes them suffering. It is the people on the fence, the people who are basically ready to walk away from the religion they grew up with but are looking for a reason to leave, and the people who already left the religion but are considering coming back because they are -- while not yet convinced -- are intrigued by the arguments of the person against whom you are arguing (Plantinga in this specific case) and are open to what they are saying about how free will is an acceptable excuse for the existence of evil in a world with an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God.

Deliberately inducing suffering, however, strikes me as something that people like myself who value an empathy-based morality should generally try to avoid and only do so if you've diligently ruled out all other potential methods of persuasion that don't cause pain, or cause less pain, than this particular technique.

I commented on his blog in this vein:

Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful.

Something came to my mind when listening to Bart Ehrman talk with Alex O’Connor about the Dark Side of Christmas. They were reflecting on the story in Matthew (2:13-23) of Herod butchering hundreds (thousands?) of babies to get rid of the up-and-coming “King of the Jews” and how that led to them escaping to Egypt. That section cites two “prophecies” from Jeremiah (Rachel weeping) and Hosea (“out of Egypt I called my son”) — arguably as an excuse — a need — for the suffering. That is, the suffering was not needless, it was needed for a purpose: that prophecy may be fulfilled.

The three most common approaches are to defend slavery as somehow actually moral (at which point the Christian has lost all moral ground and thereby advertised their religion to everyone as morally repugnant) or to change the subject with a tu quoque fallacy (which advertises to everyone that the Christian has no response to the point) or to ironically resort to moral relativism and claim God “couldn’t” preach any true morality to the ancient Israelites because they were too primitive then or the culture was different then—or whatever illogical excuse.

Have you come across any of them using a fourth technique, where they attempt to show the necessity of the suffering associated with slavery, thus negating the “needless” part of the “needless suffering” charge? I can imagine them trying, and failing, for the same reasons that “so that prophecy may be fulfilled” falls flat on a modern audience as a “need” for babies being slaughtered and their mothers crying like Rachel.

We modern audiences are, however, open to hearing arguments from necessity. They were (and still are) effectively used to justify the second world war, for example. (Note I’m focusing on persuasion here and not the next step of diligent truth-seeking, so hopefully I’m back on track to engage your main topic.)

Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful.

The irony of the first word in that quote from you is not lost on me, but have you given any thought to the suffering you are intentionally causing with this emotionally satisfying (for you, and Dillahunty, and I’ll admit myself as well) “mic drop” technique? Can you defend the necessity of this pain? Your opening paragraph seems to try, however I’m not sure you’ve exhausted all of the alternatives to this technique and analyzed them with the intent of finding the best possible technique available to us.

When I found myself nodding my head in agreement with the efficacy of this technique, I caught myself reveling in the emotional satisfaction on the part of the mic-dropper and tried to consider what it felt like to have this kind of mic dropped on me. The people who suffer from this, admittedly, are not the target of the technique. Rather, it is the people who the suffering-from-mic-dropping-evangelists wish to convert that are able to see better the moral bankruptcy of the sales pitch combined with the shift in strategies of the suffering from conversion of others and adding to their flock to not losing even more people (including themselves) to this strategy. Do these evangelists “deserve” the suffering we just inflicted on them? Are we now using suffering as retribution for their “sins” of being “irrational and often delusional?”

What might “mercy” look like to the mic-dropper?

People who have left a religion like Christianity, especially one of the conservative evangelical flavors of Christianity, often face a variety of personal loss:

• A loss of community. Once your mind shifts away from the faith, you no longer fit in. Even before you let it be known that you've changed and people start rejecting you, the very ideas that used to give you such joy and hope for the future now turn your stomach and grate at your ears. You've lost the foundations of almost all of your friendships. You suffer loneliness even while surrounded by all of your friends, and they can even be completely unaware of your internal struggles.
• A loss of your sense of aesthetics, what you used to find beautiful is now "meh," or even outright ugly to you. You might find yourself enjoying the melody of a song only to get distracted by the lyrics.
• A loss of meaning and purpose. WTF do I do now? Why should I bother? These can be replaced by cynicism, boredom, and nihilism.

This sense of loss and suffering is not at all trivial. It can lead to profound depression and anxiety -- an unmooring and an ungrounding. It can lead to much, much worse things as well.

The kind of cognitive dissonance and suffering in the person who gets the mic dropped on them when subjected to this kind of rhetorical strategy is generally not that bad, but it resembles it and can be a relatively minor form of the suffering of the newly de-converted. This is because this strategy is targeted at these believers' core values of community, aesthetics, and meaning, and the fact that these believers have been indoctrinated into a mindset that is poorly prepared for this kind of loss. So, while it is perhaps only a "minor" form of this suffering, it is nonetheless still not trivial. Not at all.

Moreover, me taking emotional pleasure in their post-mic-drop struggles turns me into a "minor" form of a sociopathic monster.

Is there perhaps a way to use a form of this technique that makes it less cruel? Realizing ahead of time what kinds of pain this mic-drop technique are likely to cause, should I resist the urge and pull my punch, or should I just say that this evil I'm perpetrating is somehow necessary, or that the probable ends justify the probably evil means?