Going back and looking at the sequences is funny. Across many posts, comments accuse Eliezer of simplifying and attacking straw-men. But as someone who was religious when he was first reading OB, and who got deconverted specifically because of the arguments therein, I think that Eliezer had it right and the accusers had it wrong: many of the arguments he refutes seem like straw-men to people who associate with other rationalists, but to those steeped in irrationality they are basically the world. Witness, for instance, a former Christian's revisiting of CS Lewis to find that he not only fails to provide a strong defense of Christianity, he's basically a joke to anyone who knows enough history or biology or sociology or psychology. But when you're in an affective death spiral, you often can't notice such things.

While I worry about the self-congratulation of threads like these, I want to nominate a lesson I learned from Robin Hanson (and Daniel Klein, another GMU economist), which will probably affect me professionally as much as my religious deconversion affected me personally:

It is ok to believe things that are obvious, even if they are unpopular.

It seems non-controversial, but when you actually find yourself in a discussion with an intelligent, like-minded person with similar interests and arguments with the backing of high-status individuals, the temptation is enormous to switch sides.