Frank and Eliezer both miss the point. It's really a question of priorities - is "starting over," in Eliezer's terms, a productive endeavor?

I think no. It's not that these institutions or texts have any special aesthetic or epistemic value, they're just really powerful. There's a reason the Catholic Church has been around for so long. We know that the religious can live in a socially responsible manner, just as we know that atheists are capable of great evil. It seems to me to be a horse and cart question - I think increasing standards of living lead to lower levels of religiosity, so going after religiosity before we tackle global poverty is backwards.

Personally I think the best atheists have to hope for in the near term is a reconciliation with religion built around the social value of voluntary spiritual practice.

It would have been helpful to interrogate Eliezer's Newtonian/relativity analogy a little more. We have reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics in the context of relativity and quantum mechanics, and now we use it as an approximation for human-scale events. In a similar way there are elements of religion that we can use as a moral shorthand. The deeply religious we can agree with understand their beliefs as such and have a deep appreciation for the yet-undiscovered unified moral field theory. While Eliezer's 12 Virtues are good for cold iron/hot iron syllogisms they don't give us any guidance on the fundamental moral questions. Some forms of religion give guidance I can agree with.

In contrast we have Eliezer's space opera. What he misses is that this story is just as morally suspect as religion is logically suspect. To organize for cryonics, space colonies et al. in the current era is to work for a very specific class interest, whether or not you see it that way.

Eliezer's climate change point belies his provincial attitude. In many parts of the world religious communities justifiably view Western secularism as the socially and ecologically destructive force. His inane reaction to Franks' reference to creative misreading was surprising. The notion that historical mythologies are reinterpreted by contemporary powers should be germane to Less Wrong readers. Liberal humanists should look to do the same.