Extant should be extent.

Sorry, these things bother me.

That sounds right. I think I'm what you'd get if you took Vladimir_M's views on hermeneutics but with a perspective on metaphysics that saw them as potentially actually correct rather than acting almost-without-exception as convenient Schelling focal points.

I'm not actually Catholic, only a prospective Catholic, and it's very possible that I'll never get around to actually getting confirmed; it seems like it would be consenting to the categorical rule of propping up institutions even when you're still rather unsure of how good they are compared to how good you should have expected them to be. I grew up agnostic and at some point identified as atheist, only converting to theism and gaining interest in religions besides Theravada Buddhism after I became a postrationalist one or two years ago; I haven't had enough time since then to come to any firm conclusions about the justification or lack thereof for converting to a particular religion.

Put another way: what of Catholic doctrine counts as as "largely some really tricky game theory" and what counts as actually true?

Oh, gosh. Um.

• I think it's plausible that there is a God in the Thomistic or Leibnizian or Kantian(?) sense, and my intuition says there is. I think it's probable that there is an entity, identifiable as YHWH, Who seems to indicate that He is the Holy Ghost (Who is the optimization imposed on the physical world by the existence of that Thomistic God), but I have no idea how much evidence I should accept as enough evidence for His implicit claim to be the Thomistic God. There's that whole "by their fruits ye shall know them" thing but I don't know what counts as satisfactorily delicious fruit. It seems like Satan or any other transhumanly intelligent entity could just as easily provide the same delicious fruits, so this would seem to come down to some tricky reasoning about priors. I'm not yet familiar with the Catholic writings on discernment.
• On the divinity and general metaphysical status of Jesus as Savior, this would seem to be some tricky reasoning about metaphysics on the one hand, and on the other hand, or more accurately on the other side of the same hand, it would seem to be some tricky reasoning about which Schelling focal points to carve out and hold fast to so as not to fall down all kinds of slippery slopes. I notice that if I or someone as generally prudent as me decided to blindly accept that Jesus was their Savior then that would be sheer epistemic laziness without trying to actually understand the social psychology or game theory surrounding why people would go out of their way to emphasize that a certain man had certain properties and that this is important for certain reasons and that doubting this or even doubting something else that would imply doubting this is like trying to "unjustifiably" undermine the allegedly "justified" thing that they're trying to do. This is like taking a very developed Kantian view of things, and honestly it seems really tricky to do right; I'd trust someone like Vladimir_M to do it better than me.
• I agree in a relatively straightforward way with their cautious eschatology about Judgment Day and the Second Coming of Christ, which I see as straightforwardly mapping onto thinking about a technological singularity and taking seriously its moral implications. Whether or not they were right by coincidence is sort of besides the point, as their emphasis is correct either way. (At some point I would like to talk to the Church to see if they're interested in funding FAI research; unfortunately I'm not sure how competent the modern Church is, nor what factions of it would be competent. Traditionally the Dominicans are impressive.)
• When it comes to supernatural stuff I generally accept Catholic doctrine, at least provisionally, e.g. the emphasis on not engaging in witchcraft or negotiating with demons.

Those are what stand out to me as the most obvious possible points of agreement or disagreement with Catholic doctrine as straightforwardly interpreted, but I might've missed some big stuff.

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.

Oh, no, not really; I think on the whole their reasons for believing what they do aren't very good, and that if their belief is justified it's mostly the result of epistemic luck rather than their personal epistemic abilities as such.

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 'largely-unconscious far-sighted social pragmatics'?"

Sorry, misinterpreted you. I think the question of "why do people generally (profess that they) believe what they (profess that they) believe" is a very interesting question and worth serious study, but that any simple answer I attempt to give will be laughably oversimplified.

My deconversion was significantly in motion prior to finding LessWrong

Okay, then my points re LessWrong don't apply at all. It's probable that my default model doesn't apply and that your reasons for deconversion are largely due to your philosophical and general epistemic intuitions.

...the actual deciding factors tend to be unconscious or sentimental drives.

How would I identify whether this is or is not the case, especially if they are unconscious?

By noticing conscious rationalization, mostly. That would at least clue you in that something funny is going on, if it is.

You continue to return to social/pragmatic aspects, which continues to leave me puzzled as to whether you think the Catholic Church's primary advantage is that it's most aligned with the wishes/truths concerning a god of some sort, or whether it's beliefs are just a side effect and what really matters is that it has the best social/pragmatic rules/suggestions for human beings of any competing religion.

I think that if you're trying to optimize for truthful and useful doctrine about morality and theology then Catholicism is the best bet unless you're astoundingly good at discovering the truth on your own. But I'm not highly confident in this judgment; you should learn from whoever is wise, and if for some reason the wisest person who's easily available is a Zen Buddhist, then you should likely become a Zen Buddhist. If there are no wise individual people around then I think Catholicism has the most reliably good infrastructure of doctrine, but again I may be wrong.

After reading all that, though, it still leaves me puzzled that a being who wants us to know about it would reveal itself (bible) in a time when we had none of these probability and game theories, and no formal study of social psychology.

If YHWH is around then He is indeed playing a subtle and puzzling game.

As in, you strike me as being rather confident in theism (or various theistic tenets) while typically offering very vague statements about specifically what they are

I'm not very confident of theism; I think it's a problem of English that it's very difficult to consistently make claims of >10% but <50% certainty. And what my intuitions say and what my betting odds are are two different things; I know better than to just trust my intuition. The reason my statements are so vague is because it would take a lot of writing to explain my intuitions about moral philosophy and decision theory to people on LessWrong whose perspective differs greatly from mine. Even people who have much of the relevant knowledge and who I would expect to easily see what I believe and why, like Vladimir_Nesov, seem to not really understand the underlying intuitions nor where they would lead if correct.

My read of this post/threads suggest that what happened is that you came out and asked "Why is theism wrong?" Then a bunch (like ~500) comments took place explaining various objections, and you concluded that everyone was attacking someone else's theism, which isn't what you hold or think is really theism.

I think that's a mischaracterization; many of the most highly upvoted comments agreed that it is possible that theism isn't wrong if by theism we mean simulationism (which is what I had contended), and the majority of the objections were along the lines of requesting that we not call simulationism by the name of theism, which is a reasonable request but not an objection to theism.

Perhaps a new post with specifics might help more (or point me to more of that if it already exists).

I think that local beliefs are stacked against mine to such an extent that an extreme burden of proof would be on me to provide strong justification and explanations for all of my claims, which just isn't feasible for me personally in the near future.

Thanks for the dialog.

You too; I'm glad there exists a place like LessWrong where a prospective Catholic convert and a prospective Catholic deconvert can have civil and productive discourse about epistemology and theology.