The broad goal, I believe, is raising the sanity waterline in the general public.
The narrow goal, as far as I can tell, is developing a solid local community of strong rationalists, and then to do things with our strengths. (Potentially: invent and test systematic methods for making people and the world more awesome, which may include science, starting businesses, making art, and generally creating things that demonstrate the effectiveness of rationality.)
For the narrow goal, we want to appeal to people who will be unusually good assets. (But not necessarily the usual suspects.) For the broad goal, it would be nice to have pitches for rationality that might nudge anyone, regardless of background, in the right direction.
Then the question from your post should be asked in the context of the goals you outline.
Regarding the "sanity waterline," I don't believe this concept presents a useful and accurate model of people's beliefs, not even as a rough first approximation. In my opinion, any action based on such a model must be fundamentally misguided one way or another.
Regarding the goal of developing a local community, you've listed a whole bunch of goals, and to answer your initial question, we must begin by asking two other questions. First, is there actually a com...
This post grew out of a very long discussion with the New York Less Wrong meetup group. The question was, should a group dedicated to rationality be explicitly atheist? Or should it make an effort to be respectful to theists in order to make them feel welcome and spread rationality farther? We argued for a long time. The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn't allow it any special pleading -- it's just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we'd lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth. The anti-atheism group said that, while that may be true, it's going to doom us to be a group exclusively for eccentric nerds, and we need to develop broad appeal, even if that's hard and requires us to leave our comfort zone.
Things got abstract very fast; my take was that we need to get back to practicalities. Different attitudes to religion have different effects on different types of people; we need to optimize for desired effects and accept what tradeoffs we must. We can't appeal equally to everyone. So I came up with a sort of typology.
The Four New Members
Annie