I'm Hemmant Tmetta and I'm Jessica Blimke and you're listening to the podcast for

Friendly atheist.com you can now listen to all of our episodes and see show notes

at friendly atheist podcast.com.

Dr Ryan T. Craigen is an associate professor of sociology at the University of

Tampa and the author of books

including what you don't know about religion but should. His latest is called

How to Defeat Religion in 10 Easy Steps. So Ryan, thanks for joining us.

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me on.

All right, so let's toss the softball out here.

So can religion be defeated?

Well, that's a great question and I think as a social scientist, right?

The way that I approach this with the book is many social scientists who study religion

they're looking at what you can do to strengthen religion and my thought was

what if we take some of their findings and just kind of flip them on their head?

And that's why I kind of was interested in writing this book is a lot of the stuff that you find that can maybe help strengthen religions.

If you invert it, you can actually also leak in religion.

So in thinking about it that way, I was like, you know what, I've got 10 things that people could do, literally people but also local organizations

and national groups, but if they just kind of put their mind to it and focused in on this,

they might be effective at weakening religion so and of course those are the steps in the book give us give us one example of something we could do

Sure a very specific example and it's a little bit counterintuitive, so maybe some of your

listeners will think, oh, I don't know that I like this, but is to synchronize things that religions control. So the example, one of the

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