This does not follow. It is not necessary for my argument that different religions all be related to each other; it is only necessary that BTanism not be related to any of them, and (this part I asserted implicitly by linking to Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable) that it not have been generated by a similar process.

OK, I think I now understand the implicit part; I think you mean that religions of old made total, and not merely ontological, claims, which BTanism doesn't (I wasn't sure before what you were picking up from Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, which I do know and read before; I thought it had something to do with disprovability).

I think you're right to point to that distinction.

Varieties of "theism" which have similar epistemological status to BTanism are not subject on LW to the same kind of dismissal as religion, to the best of my knowledge. Nor should they be. But for the sake of avoiding confusion and undesirable connotations, they certainly shouldn't be called "theism".

Well, why not, if they're varieties of theism? Perhaps it'd be better if LW found another word to condemn, other than theism?

Such a word could be... theism! It does have two definitions, a broad and a narrow one. I checked a few dictionaries to be sure, and one of them helpfully elucidated the broad one as "the opposite of atheism", and the narrow one as "the opposite of deism".

If what you mean here is "merely community-cohesiveness driven phenomenon", then I disagree entirely.

"Largely", rather than "merely", is how I would put it. I'm not certain I understand the rest of your paragraph. To my mind, atheism (or, more precisely, strong dismissal of theism) being incidental to LW's charter doesn't mean it can't become a way to cohere the group, to nurture a sense of belonging. Note, by the way, that rejection of theism made it to the Welcome post, and is a unique example of a specific shared LW value there. Although that may be for pragmatic rather than signalling reasons.

For my part, I see "open-mindedness" toward theism mostly as manifesting an inability to come to gut-level terms with the fact that large segments of the human population can be completely, totally wrong.

That's an interesting theory I'd have to think about. Do you consider agnosticism as a subset of "open-mindedness", and thus the above as the primary explanation of agnosticism?

Which?

I don't know; there are several possibilities and it'd be impolite, not to mention fruitless, on my part to speculate.

Again, this is Less Wrong, not a random internet forum. It is not possible to recapitulate the Sequences in every comment; that doesn't mean that strong opinions whose justifications lie therein are inadequately supported.

Agreed in general.

Not sure how well this applies in the particular case. This thread has focused on two assertions in your original comment: "[not] memetically related" and "superficial resemblance ... is so slight that you would never notice it unless you were motivated to do so, or heard it from someone who was". You cited a Sequence post in your follow-up comment about the former (but I don't see any reference to that post or the idea of total claims of religions in your original comment - correct me if you disagree), and after some thickness on my part I acknowledge its relevance here. You don't seem to rely on anything from the Sequences for the latter.

You're making good points, with which I largely agree, with some reservations (see below). I'd just point out that this wasn't the argument Komponisto was making - he was talking only about relatedness in the ancestry sense.

Your list of attributes is probably good enough to distinguish e.g. a simulation argument from "religions" and justify not calling it one. There are two difficulties, however. One is that adherence to these attributes isn't nearly as uniform among religions as it's often rhetorically assumed on LW to be. There's a tendency to: start talking about theism; assume in your argument that you're dealing with something like an omnipresent, omniscient monotheistic God of Judaism/Christianity whose believers are all Bible literalists; draw the desired conclusion and henceforth consider it applying to "theism" or "religion" in general. I find this fallacious tendency to be frequent in discussions of theism on LW. This comment from the earlier discussion is relevant, as are some other comments there. In this post, Eliezer comments that believing in simulation/the Matrix means you're believing in powerful aliens, not deities. Well, consider ancient Greek gods; they are not omniscient, not omnipresent, they can die... they're not more powerful than the simulation runners, and arguably not very ontologically different; are they not deities, but aliens? Was that not religion? [1]

It's kind of understandable that one thinks of the concept of God and Jehovah pops into view. But if you stick with Jehovah - and not even any Jehovah, but a particular, highly literally interpreted kind - it's no good pretending afterwards that you've dealt a blow to religion or to theism.

So proper account of what religions are actually out there makes your list of attribute much less universal, and the dividing line between religions and something like BTanism much less sharp. But, to be clear, I still think this line can be usefully drawn.

The second difficulty is something I've already written to Komponisto above: OK, it's not a religion, so what? The really important thing is whether it's like a religion in those things that ought to make a rationalist not glibly and gleefully dismiss one if they're psyched about another. And among those things worship and sacred texts are arguably less important than e.g. falsifiability. Have you seen a good way to falsify a simulation claim recently?

[1] I just remembered that Dan Simmons develops this theme in Ilium/Olympos. The second book is much worse than the first one.