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AlexU comments on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted - Less Wrong
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I had to do this until I was able to sever myself from parental support at age 20. It certainly wasn't pleasant and sometimes I still have nightmares about being discovered breaking the Sabbath (though I've told my parents long since). But if you ask me whether I would have rather remained religious,
TEN THOUSAND TIMES NO!
If Wednesday can partition, that puts an upper bound on her ability as a rationalist; it means she doesn't get on a deep level why the rules are what they are. She doesn't get, say, that the laws regarding evidence are not social customs that can be different from one place to another, but, rather, manifestations of the principle that you have to walk through a city in order to draw an accurate map of it. She can't understand the causality behind the rules, or she would simply know beyond all attempts at partitioning; she would no more be able to convince herself that faith works than convince herself that 2 + 2 = 3; it's a simple rule, and once you see it, it's obvious in one step.
In an absolute sense, God is no more plausible than Santa Claus or fairies. If you can believe in God, you can believe in anything. If Wednesday is amateur-level rational in other domains, then she may be able to contribute interesting comments to Less Wrong. But people, like chains, tend to break at their weakest link, not their strongest; and so being semi-rational in the domain of e.g. biochemistry may do her less good than you think.
The trouble with that is that I believe in some pretty weird things. I believe in a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, each of a hundred billion stars, of the Earth being a globe rushing round the sun when it appears to be still, with the sun going round it. I believe these things not because I have worked them out for myself, but because I understand that Academe believes them, more or less, and people with whom I associate believe them.
Right. The idea that we as individuals arrive at our scientific beliefs via perfect rationality is a fiction. It's good to keep in mind that our scientific beliefs are a product of a particular social network -- we believe things largely because people and institutions we trust believe those things. The difference between being a Mormon and being a scientific materialist is less a qualitative difference (i.e., one person is rational, the other is not) than one of degree, circumstance, and where you place your faith.
The historical causes of the different kinds of worldviews held by different people may be similar, but it doesn't make the different worldviews themselves similar. The evolution was implemented on the same kind of physics that fires up the stars, yet a snail is nothing like a giant ball of plasma. The answer to "2+2=" doesn't depend on where you place your faith. Even if you zealously believe that the answer is 78, even if that's what you were taught in school, just like the other kids who were taught different answers, the answer is still 4.
And there is a rational reason to believe the global scientific community, once you grow strong enough to pose the question: they are often right, and they self-check their correctness.
Of course, different worldviews may be qualitatively very different, but the point I'm making is that our personal reasons for adopting one over the other aren't all that different. My reasons for believing various scientific findings have much more to do with the sociology of my upbringing and current environment than with the actual truth or falsity of those findings. I did some lab experiments in high school and college, but to extrapolate from those personal verifications to the truth of all scientific findings is to make quite an inductive leap.
When you are still weak enough to be shaped into a zealot by any community, independently of their goodness, of course you don't make that choice, by definition. You may well remain unable to make that choice, if this ability is taken away from you by the worldview you were fed with. But rocks don't have that power either.
So, there are two questions on the table: whether there is objective difference, relative to your implicit own goals, between different worldviews instilled in you by the environment of your upbringing, and whether the people are capable of noticing that difference and acting on it.
On the presence of objective difference, I wrote in the comment to which you replied, and you seem to agree. Whether you ever grow strong enough to consider the decision to change your worldview currently significantly depends on your initial worldview, and on your native intelligence. With native intelligence a given, we can only improve this situation by spreading empowering memes.