I accept that to some degree my results say more negative things about me than about rationality, but insofar as I may be typical we need to take them into account when considering how we're going to benefit from rationality.

...my inability to communicate clearly continues to be the bane of my existence. Let me try a strained metaphor.

Christianity demands its adherents "love thy enemy", "turn the other cheek", "judge not lest ye be judged", "give everything to the poor", and follow many other pieces of excellent moral advice. Any society that actually followed them all would be a very nice place to live.

Yet real-world Christian societies are not such nice places to live. And Christians say this is not because there is anything wrong with Christianity, but because Christians don't follow their religion enough. As the old saying goes, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried." There's some truth to this.

But it doesn't excuse Christianity's failure to make people especially moral. If Christianity as it really exists can't translate its ideals into action, then it's gone wrong somewhere. At some point you have to go from "Christianity is perfect but most people can't apply it" to "Christianity is flawed because most people can't apply it."

The Christians' problem isn't that there aren't enough Christians. And it's not that Christians aren't devout and zealous enough. And it's not even that Christians don't understand what their faith expects of them. Their problem is that the impulse to love thy neighbor gets lost somewhere between theory and action. My urge as an outsider is to blame it on a combination of akrasia, lack of sufficient self-consciousness, and people who accept Christianity 100% on the conscious level but don't "feel it in their bones".

If I were a theologian, I would be recommending to my fellow Christians one of two things:

First, that they spend a whole lot less time in Bible study than they do right now, because they already know a whole lot more Bible than they actually use, and teaching them more Bible isn't going to solve that problem. Instead they need to be spending that time thinking of ways to solve their problem with applying the Bible to real life.

Or second, that they stop talking about how moral Christianity makes them and how a Christian society will always be a moral society and so on and so it's beneficial that everyone learn Christianity, and just admit that Christians probably aren't that much more moral than atheists and that they're in it because they like religion. In that case they could go on talking about the Bible to their hearts' content.

Now, to some degree, we can blame individual Christians for the failure of Christianity to transform morality for the better. But we also have to wonder if maybe it's not even addressing the real problem, which is less of a lack of moral ideals than a basic human inability to translate moral ideals into action.

Right now I find myself in the same situation as a devout Christian who really wants to be good, but has noticed that studying lots of Bible verses doesn't help him. Less Wrong has thus far seemed to me like a Bible study group where we all get together and talk about how with all this Bible studying we'll all be frickin saints soon. Eliezer's community-building posts seem like Catholics and Episcopalians arguing on the best way to structure the clergy. It's all very interesting, but...

...but I feel like there is insufficient appreciation that the Art of Knowing the Bible and the Art of Becoming a Saint are two very different arts, that we haven't really begun developing the second, and that religion has a bad track record of generating saints anyway.

Your objection sounds too much like saying that since I'm not a saint yet, I must simply not be applying my Bible study right. Which is in one sense true, but centuries of Christians telling each other that hasn't created any more saints. So people need to either create an Art of Becoming A Saint worthy of the name, or stop insisting that we will soon be able to create saints on demand.