1) Because they'll say with their lips, "Oh, well, I just want the true essence" and then go on denying homosexuals the right to marry because it's the word of God.

2) What's left, exactly?

3) Nazism would have been unexceptional if it had been an ancient religion instead of a modern government. Why can't modern Nazis disavow ancient Nazi practice in favor of some true essence that makes sense in modern terms?

4) Why not start your search for the true essence in Lord of the Rings, which dominates the Bible both ethically and aesthetically? Or Harry Potter? Or Oh My Goddess?

And above all,

5) Because it's a fantastically elaborate way of refusing to admit you were wrong.

Very well written, as usual. But many other modern institutions have analogous ancient institutions that look rather silly by modern standards. Consider trial by combat in law, or ancient scholastic obsessions with the "true" meaning of ancient texts. If lawyers and academics can disavow these ancient practices, while still embracing a true essence of law or academia, why can't religious folks disavow ancient religious practice in favor of some true essence that makes sense in modern terms?

Eliezer, imagine you knew two people who both did embarrassing stupid things when they were young, and that one person you excused with "boys will be boys" or "the folly of youth", while the other you told to anyone that would listen that you would never trust or associate with a person who did such a terrible thing. This would seem to be playing favorites, unless perhaps the difference is that one person repented of their youthful acts while the other did not.

Similarly, you seem to be playing favorites in allowing lawyers and academics to disavow their silly ancient practices, while insisting that religious folks today take responsibility for ancient foolish religious claims. Sure your criticism sticks to those who refuse to disavow those ancient claims, but I think we should treat differently those, like Unitarians, who to do so disavow.

My main problem is that I find it hard to understand what such people are in fact claiming. At least I understood the ancient foolish claims, mostly.

From a practical perspective, it seems to me that we need religion to bolster the arrogance of the non-religious. It seems a-priori impossible that I could be right when my opinions go strongly against social consensus. I am thus tempted towards a weak form of philosophical majoritarianism http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/on_majoritarian.html but then I remember religion and it sets me back on the right track.

Actually, Robin, come to think of it, you may be executing an inappropriate shift between levels of abstraction.

Science is not the same as a particular scientific theory. Any particular scientific theory is subject to the Bayes-law, the rules of evidence, and may be destroyed by contrary evidence; any particular scientific theory is disprovable. This is what people mean when they say "Science is falsifiable." They're referring to every particular instance of science, not the abstract category Science. Red is a color, blood is red, blood is not a color.

When someone says "I am a scientist", they (should) mean that they identify with the rules of evidence, not with any particular theory. You can disavow past specific scientific theories, and still remain a scientist, so long as you avow the rules of evidence. A lawyer can disavow trial by combat, and still avow justice, but then they cannot call themselves a medievalist.

Similarly, when I talk about "religion's claim to be non-disprovable" I mean the claim that specific religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism are non-disprovable.

What is the category that includes both the Bhagavad-Gita and the Twelve Virtues of Rationality? I'm not sure there is one. But it certainly isn't the category "religion". Atheism is not a religion. They are both answers, perhaps, albeit answers to different questions using different methods. Maybe the superspace should be called "answerism". Perhaps you could reject Christianity but try to answer the same sort of questions Christianity did using a completely different method, i.e., "How old is the universe?" = "Six thousand years, because it sounds cool" -> "13 billion years, because we went out and looked using telescopes", while still legitimately calling yourself an "answerist". But you would then have rejected religion as a general method of answering; permitting science, democracy, and personal acceptance of responsibility for moral arguments, to answer various questions formerly answered by scripture.

Robin, I would indeed put someone who called themselves a Unitarian in a different class from someone who called themselves a Zoroastrian or Christian. It's still a big blatant mistake, but so long as the person is willing to take strict personal responsibility for their own moral judgments, it's a less urgent matter.

You can call yourself a scientist and disavow association with Newton by standing up and saying, "Newton was wrong, and I know better, because I come from a superior culture." But then you certainly cannot call yourself a Newtonian. Likewise you cannot call yourself a "flat-Earther" and disavow association with the idea that the Earth is flat because you are pursuing the "true essence" of flat-Earthism. You could repudiate all scripture and still call yourself spiritual, but there would still have to be that moment of repudiation, of admitting you were wrong.

Hollerith, read the Old Testament. Scripture used to make the laws. Not just when to bring sacrifices, but the death penalty for kidnapping, how much to pay a man for raping his daughter, that sort of thing. That's the function I was referring to as being taken over by "democracy", which, yes, we all know isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than scripture. If you assumed I meant that democracy could dictate morality, that just goes to show how unconsciously people accept the Big Lie of the Bible being an ethical philosophy.

In case anyone is confused by the differences between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism, I'll pass along this amusing comment:

Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament is the sequel. Then the Qu'ran comes out, and it retcons the last one like it never happened. There's still Jesus, but he's not the main character anymore, and the messiah hasn't shown up yet.

Jews like the first movie but ignored the sequels, Christians think you need to watch the first two but the third movie doesn't count, Moslems think the third one was the best, and Mormons liked the second one so much they started writing fanfiction that doesn't fit with ANY of the series canon.

Paul, since "rationality" for many people is a function of what they think they can get away with, I think there is winnable territory in terms of making belief in a scriptural religion - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Scientology, etc. - socially less acceptable within the science/engineering community. If people know that saying "I believe in this 2,500-year-old culture dump" will be met by people saying, out loud or silently, "How incredibly stupid", they will be more reluctant to do it. One small step toward waking up out of the long nightmare. If people are not socially expected to think, they will not think.

Joshua, thanks, fixed.

I'm going to focus on one word in your comment: "democracy".

So, you would permit "democracy ... to answer various questions formerly answered by scripture"?

It makes me sad to learn that. I am strongly opposed to the idea that counting votes is a good way of arriving at ordinary or moral truth (unless perhaps one is very picky about whose vote counts).

Of course, that pernicious idea --Majority Rule-- is so prevalent in our world that I would not bother to voice my objection except that you are the leader of a project that if successful will impose on the entire future light cone decisions that will have the same unbendable and irreversible character that physical law now has. This property of irreversibility is quite unique to your project. (There are other project that would impose irreversible conditions, namely sterilization of the biosphere, if they fail or go wrong, but yours is the only one I know of that would do so if you succeed.)

What makes my agony and my sadness particularly acute is the knowledge that up to the age 19 or so, you wrote about ultimate ends in ways I found completely benign and lovable. I refer of course to documents like TMOLFAQ, which apparently you are now so ashamed of that you have removed it from the web.

Oh how sad it made me to read your Collective Extrapolated Volition document, with its horror of disenfranchisement, plus your speculations about extending the franchise to non-human primates, as if the very contingent, accidental, particular political religion of our times were a universal law of the universe that no rational agent with sufficient time to grow wise could object to!

Oh yeah: nice series of blog entries. Thanks for writing. And know that I know that it is only because your commitment to unambiguous publication of your beliefs that it is possible for me to snipe at you in this way.

A peripheral correction:

They found out that, during the supposed time of the Exodus from Egypt, Egypt ruled Canaan. The tribes would have fled to find Pharaoh's armies already at the destination.

When Egypt ruled Canaan, it was through vassal kings and not with large garrisons (although there were occasional Egyptian governors and forts). Egyptian rule was weak, partial, and often broke down completely: There were kings opposed to Egypt, the vassals were not always loyal, and all kings were under attack from each other and from nomads. Some of these nomads may even be connected by name to the "Hebrews." It is not clear that Egypt would have truly "ruled" Canaan at certain dates which could be suggested for the Exodus.

None of this says that the precise Biblical story is true, nor damage your argument significantly, but the historical record does not suggest that flight from Egypt to Canaan would be quite so absurd as suggested here.

"not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe"

Eli, Not sure what you'd consider "the Old testament", but just to be fair to tanakh:

Psalm 8:3-9 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?

On a different note, Bob Aumann explained his religion by "orthogonality" in an interview; not sure if that was in the same sense as you're using it here, but made as much sense as the trinity to me (none).

Eliezer: Those who espouse any separate magisteria seem to me to consistently espouse only two: science and religion. Other scientific questions, even contentious, fervently-believed ones that impact morality and public policy, are subject to the normal rules of science. Yahweh's existence gets a magisterium, but global warming, aptitude equality among races and sexes, and the extent of neural activity in fetuses do not. At least, nobody admits they do. Do you believe any secular beliefs are protected by NOMA, perhaps by another name? Is there a generalized lesson that secular opponents of cognitive bias should learn from this, beyond the universal application of science?

I hope the priests of Baal checked that it was indeed water, and not some sort of accelerant.

DB, I think you're making a false dichotomy, and I don't see how your position avoids your religion degenerating into power-worship or something equally unpalatable. Why do you worship and serve God? Because he's good? Bzzt, nope, because you've made "good" completely content-free when predicated of God. Because he's big and powerful and created the world? Power-worship. (Would you worship the devil if he were more powerful than God?) Because he's saved you from your sins? Mere self-interest. (If the devil could make an even better offer -- save you from your sins and provide you with a billion dollars, or whatever -- would you worship him instead?)

Also: If you don't trust your notion of goodness to tell you whether or not God would engage in genocide or mass murder on a feeble pretext, why do you trust it to tell you whether or not he'd supply you with deliberately deceiving scriptures, traditions, revelations, etc.?

I can't speak for Eliezer, but I expect he'd agree with me on this: yes, sure, there are religions that can't be disproven, or even have strong evidence offered against them. (Or for them.) I think he's saying only (1) that it's not true that religion as such somehow doesn't interact with evidence in such a way as to be disprovable, and (2) that some religions with a great many adherents saying that they can't be disproved are -- to be as generous as possible -- the descendants of religions that were disprovable, and it sure looks as if the adjustments that may have made them non-disprovable were made in direct response to the appearance of credible threats of actual disproof.

(Of course "disproof" in that paragraph is shorthand for "being rendered very improbable by weighty contrary evidence".)

Of course all of us believe some things despite being aware of what ought to be sufficient contrary evidence. Put a little differently: all of us are irrational sometimes. That undisputed fact doesn't tell us anything about whether it's ever right to believe things despite a heavy preponderance of contrary evidence, or when it is if so.

If you find the idea of trying to become more rational and less biased "anxious" and outmoded and otherwise disagreeable: well, fine, that's up to you. I've suggested before (in conversation with someone else) that maybe there should be a site at www.embracingbias.com for those who take that view. But then, what are you doing here? :-)

I think "Christianity" is too vague a term to denote something disprovable (or provable). But, again being as generous as possible, some varieties of Christianity do make statements about the world that could be supported or undermined by evidence, and typically it turns out that it's the latter. And these aren't freaky culty fringe versions of Christianity, but perfectly mainstream versions -- except that in some circles nowadays what's considered mainstream is something that would have been considered majorly blasphemous to just about any serious Christian from the start of Christianity through to a couple of centuries ago at the latest.

Of course that needn't bother you; plenty of things that are widely and solidly known now would have astonished the scientists of a couple of centuries ago, and that doesn't discredit science. The difference is that Christianity, or any other revealed religion, is backward-looking in a way that (for instance) science isn't. Unless you reckon that God has revealed everything to you directly, whatever reasons you have for believing in Christianity rather than (say) some sort of vague deism or something vaguely Christian but lavishly heretical have to go via the beliefs of the church through the ages, or the Bible, or some other thing that establishes continuity with the ancient Christian tradition. And that is somewhat discredited if it turns out that until very recently almost all Christians believed (as part of their religion) a bunch of false things.

@ Paul Gowder:

"I wonder to what extent it's really possible to argue people out of religion. And I strongly suspect it's close to zero."

I was argued of religion. An epistemic argument is what did it -- the "God" I "believed in" turned out to be a nearly meaningless concept.

To Robin: I think the central problem is that religion makes claims, not arguments, and then changes its claims when they become untenable. But since claims are all religion has got, it doesn't really have an essence to keep constant during this process. Perhaps one could argue that the method of making claims is what the essence is, like the scholarly or lawyerly method/mentality. This is hard for me to swallow, though, since the religious method of claiming is just "because God says so," which doesn't strike me as a permissible essence. Similarly, religious people like to talk about "faith" as the essence, but this is circular.