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bogus comments on My Kind of Moral Responsibility - Less Wrong
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I think you're trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A "low prior" means that something is unlikely -- directly. It does not offer proof that it's unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
And there doesn't seem to be any reason to talk about priors, anyway. It's not like at any moment we expect a new chunk of information and will have to update our beliefs. I think it's simpler to just talk about available evidence.
As a preface let me say that I basically agree with the thrust of your arguments. I am not a Christian, afer all. However I don't consider them as anything close to a "proof" -- they look weaker to me than to you.
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run "counter" to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers' airplane was not "counter" to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke's Third Law.
Not to mention that "all previous observations" include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
That's a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are "true". However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
See above -- different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there's nothing underlying them.
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
Who says that they didn't? Chinese folk religion acknowledged Shang-di (also called Tian, 'Heaven') as the primordial, universal deity, which is essentially a kind of henotheism and quite close historically to monotheism. This is especially true since other deities, while worthy of veneration and sacrifice, were largely conflated with "spirits". Of course, the later ideology of Confucianism tended to supplant these ancestral beliefs as a genuine foundation for ethics and philosophy/general worldview, although it did encourage the practice of rituals as a way of maintaining social harmony and a tightly-knit community.
I do. If you squint hard enough you can detect monotheism in any religious system at which point the term "monotheism" loses any meaning.
I'm using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
But the point is, the ancestral version of what would later evolve into Judaism was far from monotheistic; much like Chinese folk religion. As with almost anything else in history, monotheism was a gradual development.
Sure. But let's go a bit upthread and look at my original sentence:
Note the word "develop".
Christianity not only has the trinity but also a bunch of saints towards whom you can pray and who then supposedly intervene. Additionally there are a bunch of angels. There's the devil and demons.