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.
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).