but I don't think you're advancing one of them either

I haven't been advancing anything so far. I was just marveling at the readiness, nay, enthusiasm with which people declare themselves to be hard-headed fanatics ready and willing to do anything in the pursuit of the One True Goal.

If your evidence is good enough, then one must choose the lesser horror.

There are... complications here. First let me mention in passing two side issues. One is capability: even if you believe the "lesser horror" is the right way, you may find yourself unable to actually do that horror. The other one is change: you are not immutable. What you do changes you, the abyss gazes back, and after committing enough lesser horrors you may find that your ethics have shifted.

Getting back to the central point, there are also two strands here. First, you are basically saying that evil can become good through the virtue of being the lesser evil. Everything is comparable and relative, there are no absolute baselines. This is a major fork where consequentialists and deontologists part ways, right?

Second is the utilitarian insistence that everything must be boiled down to a single, basically, number which determines everything. One function to rule them all.

I find pure utilitarianism to be very fragile.

Consider a memetic plague (major examples: communism and fascism in the first half of the XX century; minor example: ISIS now). Imagine a utilitarian infected by such a memetic virus which hijacks his One True Goal. Is there something which would stop him from committing all sorts of horrors in the service of his new, somewhat modified "utility"? Nope. He has no failsafes, there is no risk management, once he falls he falls to the very bottom. If he's unlucky enough to survive till the fever passes and the virus retreats, he will look at his hands and find them covered with blood.

I prefer more resilient systems, less susceptible to corruption, ones which fail more gracefully. Even at the price of inefficiency and occasional inconsistency.

Yes? Of course?

Why don't you go ask some.

With the caveats that the concept of 'Christianity' is the medieval one you mentioned above

Huh? The "concept" of Christianity hasn't changed since the Middle Ages. The relevant part is that you either get saved and achieve eternal life or you are doomed to eternal torment. Of course I don't mean people like Unitarian Universalists, but rather "standard" Christians who believe in heaven and hell.

Is the notion that the morality of actions is dependent on reality really that surprising to you?

Morality certainly depends on the perception of reality, but the point here is different. We are talking here about what you can, should, or must sacrifice to get closer to the One True Goal (which in Christianity is salvation). Your answer is "everything". Why? Because the One True Goal justifies everything including things people call "horrors". Am I reading you wrong?

But it's quite easy to prove that every actually existing theistic* religion (that I and whoever I'm talking to have ever heard of) is false.

I don't believe this is true. Can you demonstrate? Let's take Christianity as the most familiar theistic religion. Here is the Nicene Creed, prove that it is false.

For each existing religion, one can easily set out evidence of its wrongness that would (1) be very convincing to the majority of people who are not already positively disposed towards that religion and (2) be good reasoning in the abstract;

The same is true for atheism, and certainly for utilitarianism.

Original thread here.

(I think Eugene is downvoting your comments on this thread.)

I'm not sure this is true, for a number of reasons.

By "one can easily set out evidence of its wrongness" I presume that you meant one particular set of evidence. In that case, I am not sure that you can in fact choose one particular set of evidence which would be very convincing to the majority of people. It's true that if you take all the people who disagree with a religion, then take any individual among them, you can easily find something which is convincing to him. But that may not be the same thing which is convincing to someone else. And since people who are religious typically think there is some evidence for their religion, they will disagree with some arguments against other religions because they will see that those arguments could also refute their own. They will see them as "proving too much." So it is not clear at all that you can take one particular set of evidence and convince the majority.

On the other hand, if you meant you can find a set of evidence that matches each individual, your argument is in fact too wide, because it would apply to nearly all philosophical views, including contrary ones, as time mentioned in his comment in regard to atheism and utilitarianism.

If you are avoiding that consequence by means of the "good reasoning in the abstract", I have various issues with that. First, it is possible to argue for something with "good reasoning in the abstract" in a way which would be convincing to many or most people, but which would become unconvincing if they were aware of other evidence and arguments for the opposite position. If good reasoning is supposed to mean that you mention all of the evidence, then your argument is question begging -- you are saying nothing more than that you have considered all of the relevant evidence that you can find, and you consider the most reasonable position to be that all religions are false. I agree both with this assessment of the evidence and the conclusion. But I am not going to assert that I am the only one who engages in good reasoning, and I realize that there are people who have considered basically all of the evidence that I have considered, and who are basically reasonable people, and nonetheless think that some religion is true.

Finally, I am not sure that it is true to say "if we combine these, we get a strong argument that no existing religion is close to the truth," even given the other things, because we can make arguments that are convincing to most people that any particular person is not going to win the lottery, but this is not a strong argument that no one is going to win.

Rather, people are generally not interested in seeking truth on certain subjects

This is certainly true and not limited to religion, too.

Yes, I basically agree with this, although I think it applies to the vast majority of non-religious people as much as to religious people, including in regard to religious topics. In other words it is mostly not for the sake of truth that someone holds religious beliefs, and it is mostly not for the sake of truth that someone else holds non-religious beliefs.

Also, it does mean that people are bad at discovering the truth on the topics where they do not want to discover it, just as people are generally bad at jobs they do not want to do.