If you don't accept my apostasy as legit, do you accept the beliefs of most of your fellow Catholics as such?
I don't accept them as individually providing very much evidence at all; in the vast majority of cases other factors screen off any evidence.
...the default explanation for conversion, i.e. largely-unconscious far-sighted social pragmatics...
Could you provide some more specifics? Like I want to sin or don't like my friends or what?
Well it's a default explanation so I don't have anything for you specifically in mind. But that you're a member of LessWrong means there's a fair bit of pressure on you to believe whatever LessWrong thinks it's good to believe, and if your brain has decided that you're not getting much benefit or a feeling of recognition and status from the Catholic social sphere then it's liable to find ways to play up the importance of meshing with alternative social spheres like LessWrong. I don't deny that you've searched for truth in good faith, but you can search in good faith for ages and still be unsure what to do; the actual deciding factors tend to be unconscious or sentimental drives.
I think you'd have to be at a Michael Vassar or Nick Tarleton level...
And are they Catholic or non-religious? If non-religious... do you accept their apostasy?
I think they are both religious in the relevant sense, but not specifically Catholic. I accept their non-Catholicism as evidence against something but not really against the truth of Catholicism as such; it's more evidence against the benefit of tying yourself to Catholicism specifically rather than trying to forge a new religion. I think they have more agency than I do right now and so I don't think their non-Catholicism is much evidence that I'd be wrong to convert to Catholicism or that they think that I'd be wrong to convert to Catholicism. Ultimately I would like to make a new religion, which is I think what they'd like to do, but in the meantime I think Catholicism is the best religion around. I think this idea of a religion being true or false is clearly misguided; it's more a question of how you interpret the world and what institutions allow for more and more-justified optimization of the world, which is heavily contingent on pragmatics of human psychology.
While I'm not smart enough to do it (yet), I would love to see a Bayesian analysis (since you mentioned it) on the probability that a god who values the salvation of souls in the highest degree would require the subject comprehension and intellectual dedication you demand to order to believe (or not). Or require the words of a book spread on foot as the only means toward knowing which specific god is real. Or even that given one true god, the other fake ones would also use the means of an inspired text to spread knowledge of themselves.
This is why I emphasized social psychology and game theory, because doing thorough analyses of questions like these is simply too difficult. We have to find a way to take people's impressions and cultural traditions and use them correctly as evidence, because so much thought has implicitly gone into answering questions like these that there's no easy way to directly access. And maybe the way we're posing the questions involves presuppositions that aren't in fact accurate, e.g. maybe we think that others believe something that they only say they believe when really they believe this other thing that is more reasonable but if we deny the former then that means unjustifiably denying the latter. This sort of thing happens constantly, and without very good models of social psychology, game theory, cognitive science, and hermeneutics generally we simply can't even come close to getting the right answers.
Oh, and I meant to ask: feel free to provide links/references to what you find most convincing concerning theism.
I don't think there are references that explain the sorts of things that got me interested in theism in the first place, specifically various intuitions about moral philosophy and decision theory. After I had those I could look into Kant or Aquinas and be impressed, but I don't know if I would have realized the depth of their arguments if I hadn't thought about the moral philosophy and decision theory on my own first.
I don't accept them as individually providing very much evidence at all...
Hard to tell what you meant. I didn't mean to ask whether you accept their belief as providing evidence for theism... only whether or not you think their belief is justified given the level of knowledge you expect from me not to believe.
Well it's a default explanation so I don't have anything for you specifically in mind.
But I still don't understand the meaning of that default explanation... and so I just meant "what types of things count as fitting the definition of 'lar...
Edited 3/4/2012: I shortened up the summary a bit and add the following update:
Thanks for the lively comments. As a preliminary summary of things I've found quite useful/helpful:
It's almost one year later, and I've finally made tangible progress on some of the input suggested in my post about being non-religious in a primarily religious environment. That is, I have a near-final draft of a "coming out" statement I plan to share with a majority of those who know me.
I was involved in two religious communities for about six years of my life (SPO and CCR). Two years post-deconversion from Catholicism, many of them still do not know I no longer believe in god. This can make for awkward interactions for myself, as well as for my wife, who's still a believer. She thought it would be helpful if everyone was on the same page, as did I.