You say you want to convince people "without having to shorten all of the freaking Inferential Distance". Yet you seem not to realize that to do so would be to practice a Dark Art.

Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren't actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam's Razor and Bayesian statistics. I've tried shortcuts, such as saying "it's just like how a patient is usually less qualified to diagnose their symptoms than a doctor," but that has never succeeded in conveying the message. If someone doesn't actually understand why entities shouldn't be multiplied beyond necessity and how to use evidence to evaluate claims, they're not going to accept what you say about their claims. We can keep trying to explain these concepts, and I do, but they have to decide they want to learn them.

*It's usually much more than just that, because religious people tend to come from a very anthropocentric worldview, where morality is objective, life has inherent meaning, human beings have souls, etc. We might speak the same language, but we're using very different systems of thought.

Edit to add: Eliezer has a very good post on this subject which makes the point better than I did: it's not enough just to cite Occam's Razor, Bayes' Theorem, etc.; there has to be understanding. Importantly, developing that understanding requires taking doubt seriously.

Even when it's explicitly pointed out, some people seemingly cannot follow the leap from the object-level "Use Occam's Razor! You have to see that your God is an unnecessary belief!" to the meta-level "Try to stop your mind from completing the pattern the usual way!"

...

If "Occam's Razor!" is your usual reply, your standard reply, the reply that all your friends give - then you'd better block your brain from instantly completing that pattern, if you're trying to instigate a true crisis of faith.

Better to think of such rules as, "Imagine what a skeptic would say - and then imagine what they would say to your response - and then imagine what else they might say, that would be harder to answer."

Or, "Try to think the thought that hurts the most."

And above all, the rule:

"Put forth the same level of desperate effort that it would take for a theist to reject their religion."

You are absolutely right. While I felt deeply pressured to put this out of the way, I should have saved a draft and waited until I had clarified and organized the concept before presenting it here. Not so much because I fear hurting the readers' sensibilities, but because a badly written post hurts the integrity of this site I love so much. *I have discussed with religious people left, down and right, and have been confronted with a very large variety of arguments. There was a part of my way to atheism where I was literally *begging theists I trusted to help me find arguments to protect my faith. They kept disappointing me. Only when I felt as certain as I thought I would ever be that no new arguments could come up, I decided to make the great leap over Hell, and officially abandon religion. If I thought there was a non-negligible chance of new arguments swaying me, I wouldn't have abandoned theism, purely out of fear of Hell. *Not necessarily: as other posters have pointed out in this discussion, some arguments need more reduction of inferential distance than other, which are much more immediate. Pointing out incosistencies and counterexamples, for example, is far more efficient in making people doubt than explaining the epistemiological merits of Occham's Razor and reductionism.

I don't get your meaning. Freeing yourself, how do you do that? Why reinvent the wheel? While I was on the straight path to rejecting religion, I could have kept inventing excuses and making stuff up forever, I might even have become a religious expert. I seriously considered becoming a theologian at some point and work to bring out the True Original Islam As Intended By The Prophet (TM) which both the reactionary bigots and the westernized "moderns" were not following. If it hadn't been for people like Yudkowsky who were able to speak to me in a language I shared and point out the massive failings of my system, I would have continued to invent one patch after another, the same way smart, strong people have been doing for centuries.

And I don't see what's wrong with wanting to Save The World, that was the frame that has directed all of my actions ever since I had a concept of what that meant. Of course, Akrasia is a bitch, and Behaving In A Way Such As If All Behaved Like You You Would Like This World Better can be freaking hard, but I've never given up. How is that bad self-psychology?