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gjm comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong
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I think that Eliezer oversimplifies religious beliefs. People who have witnessed terrible things have kept their faith. People who have witnessed their loved ones being killed and tortured still have clung on to their religion. These people have had all the reason in the world to doubt the existence of a benevolent god. They surely have thought of the weak points, when you find yourself being tortured, you don´t keep your faith just because you want an explanation for everything. And afterward I find it hard to believe they just reasoned away it all. My point is that sheer idiocy probably didn´t convince all of those who have suffered, something else must have fooled them, or a lot of things combined.
This would be a stronger argument if people were generally something close to perfect reasoners, and especially if they were so when subjected to terrible suffering. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. In the face of terrible suffering people are frequently very irrational, and I wouldn't attach much weight to what happens to their religious position in such cases. (They might, e.g., cling to religious beliefs they find comforting, even if the thing they need comforting because of is really very good evidence against those beliefs. Or they might abandon religious beliefs because they're so badly hurt they can no longer conceive of such a thing as a good god, even if they have what are objectively very good reasons to think that their former beliefs aren't invalidated by what they've suffered.)
Even very intelligent and reasonable people who generally try very hard to be skeptical and rational can be extremely irrational about things they've believed for a very long time, grown used to, and built their identities around. Political and (ir)religious positions are particularly liable to be held irrationally. If any part of your belief is founded on the idea that what lots of intelligent and reasonable people believe can't be terribly wrong, you should reconsider that. The existence of lots of intelligent and reasonable Christians is, unfortunately, perfectly compatible with Christianity being obviously crazy when looked at objectively; the existence of lots of intelligent and reasonable atheists, likewise, is perfectly compatible with atheism being obviously crazy when looked at objectively.
(My opinion is that neither is obviously crazy, but that very few reasonable people would be much inclined to think Christianity likely to be right if they encountered it afresh without the influence of a culture saturated in Christianity, and if when they did encounter it they saw an unbiased selection of relevant evidence rather than e.g. meeting it through the preaching of evangelists whose goal is more to persuade than to inform.)