When deciding which criteria to use to determine which irrational beliefs you should keep (or whether any should be kept at all, or how to decide that), you need to start from first principles, and not work backwards from foregone conclusions. In this case, it seems to me that your foregone conclusions were "keeping religion is okay" and "approaches to rationality that allow me to keep religious beliefs are better than those that do not" to some premises that allow for those conclusions.
For example, taking your point (1), if "eschewing your religious beliefs makes you feel depressed and you are unable to work productively" is a valid justification, then "eschewing your Aryan Brotherhood beliefs makes you feel depressed and you are unable to work productively" should be an equally valid justification for some people.
If you really think that the 3 criteria of (1) are valid or can be made valid, try this: replace all references to religion and spiritual and God in the criteria in order to make them generic, and then try to derive some undesirable conclusions from the generic criteria. If you can't, please report back the generic criteria. If you can, then it follows that they're not valid in general, so they're not valid for religion unless you are making an exception for religion (in which case you don't need to waste time trying to justify the conclusion at all, since it's assumed to be true).
I didn't mean to imply that working back from a conclusion is not a perfectly valid proof technique. It's used all the time in math. The problem is that in real-life, due to various cognitive biases, it's easy to use it as a form of rationalization, where instead of creating a chain of statements from the conclusion back to the premises that deductively proves the conclusion, we end up creating a chain of rationalizations, each of which is sort of plausible, without verifying that the statements prove what they're supposed to prove and don't also have undesirable implications. It's far easier to start from the generic, which invokes far fewer biases than starting from the specific.
Thank you enormously for this constructive feedback. Truthfully, I am making a sincere effort to join the group (in my typical antagonistic tack) but I am overwhelmed. It will take me some time (and mistakes) to learn how to communicate on this forum, and it helps to have one or two directions in which to optimize learning first.
The need for the arguments to work independent of their subject is something I probably forgot to apply rigorously. But arguments do need to work independently of their content and it is worth some extra effort to double-check t...
In response to: The uniquely awful example of theism
And Maybe Theism Is OK
Finally, I think I understand where gim and others are coming from when they made statements that I thought represented overly intolerant views of religious belief. I think that a good summary of the source of the initial difference in opinion is that while many people in this group have the purpose to eliminate all sources of irrationality, I would like to pick and choose which sources of irrationality I have in the optimization of a different problem: general life-hacking.
Probably many people in this group believe that the best life-hack would be to eliminate irrationality. But I'm pretty sure this depends on the person (not everyone is suited for X-rationality), and I'm pretty sure -- though not certain -- that my best life-hack would include some irrationality.
Since my goals are different than that of this forum, many of my views are not relevant here, and there is no need to debate them.
Instead, I would like to present two arguments (1,2) for why it could be rational to hold an irrational belief, and two arguments (3,4) as to why someone could be more accepting of the existence of irrational beliefs (i.e., why not to hate it).
(1) It could be rational to hold an irrational belief if you are aware of your irrational belief and choose to hold it because it is grafted to components of your personality/ psyche that are valuable to you. For example, you may find that
I imagine these situations would be the result of an organically developing mind that has made several errors and is possibly unstable. But until we have a full understanding of mental processes/psychology/the physiology of emotions, we cannot expect a rational person to just "tough it out" to optimize rationality while his life falls apart.
Later added: This argument has since been described better, with a better emphasis, with [this comment.](http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq/how_much_thought/6zp)
(2) It could be rational to hold an irrational belief if you choose to hold it because you would like to exercise true control of your mind. Put another way, you may find it to be an aesthetic art of some form to choose a set of beliefs and truly believe them. Why would anyone want to do this? Eliminating all beliefs and becoming rational is a good exercise in controlling your mind. I hazard that a second exercise would be to believe what you consciously choose to.
(3) I think there is another reason to consciously choose to try to believe something that you don't believe rationally-- true understanding of the enemy; the source and the grip of an irrational thought. What irked me most about the negative comments about religious views was the lack of any empathy for those views. It may seem like a contradiction but while I believe some religious views are irrational I do not dismiss people who hold them as hopelessly irrational. With empathy, I believe that it is possible to hold religious views and not greatly compromise rationality.
(4) Maybe you are indeed right that any kind of religious view is irrational and that we would be better off without it. However, it is not at as clear that religious views can ever be completely exorcised... Suppose we wanted to create a world in which important parts of people's personalities are never tied to religious views. Are children allowed to daydream? Is a child allowed to daydream they are omnipotent? Are they allowed to pretend there is a God for a day? How will it affect creativity and motivation and development if there is no empathy for an understanding of God?