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.

Conditional on being sufficiently convinced such a goal is true, which I am not and assign negligible probability to ever being.

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.

Both are issues that must be addressed, but they don't imply one should abandon the attempt. Also, they aren't exclusive to doing extremely horrible instrumental things in pursuit of even-more-extremely good outcomes.

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?

I'm saying that whether or not you embrace a notion of the absolute magnitude of good and evil - that is, of a moral true zero - an evil can be the least evil of all available options.

More importantly, deontology is completely compatible with theology. Many people believe(d) in the truth of a religion, and also that that religion commands them to either convert or kill non-believers. This is where the example used in this thread comes from: "burn their bodies - save their souls". So I'm not sure if you're proposing deontology as a solution, and if so, how.

I find pure utilitarianism to be very fragile.

I'm not a utilitarian, for a better reason than that: utilitarianism doesn't describe my actual moral feelings (or those of almost all other people, as far as I can tell), so I see no reason to wish to be more utilitarian. In particular, I assign very different weights to the wellbeing of different people.

Imagine a utilitarian infected by such a memetic virus which hijacks his One True Goal.

That is not very different from imagining a meme that infects any other kind of consequentialist and hijacks the moral weight of a particular outcome. Or which infects deontologists with new rules (like religions sometimes do).

Why don't you go ask some.

I mentioned three crucial caveats. I think it would be difficult to find Christians in 2016 who have no doubts and swallow the bullet about the implications of Christianity. It would be a lot easier a few hundred years ago.

Huh? The "concept" of Christianity hasn't changed since the Middle Ages

What I mean is that the religious beliefs of the majority of people who call themselves Christians have changed a lot since medieval times.

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?

I don't see the relevance of what you call a "One True Goal". I mean, One True Goal as opposed to what? Several Sorta True Goals? Ultimately, no matter what your goals are, you will necessarily be willing to sacrifice things that are less important to you in order to achieve them. Actions are justified as they relate to the accomplishment of a goal, or a set of goals.

If I were convinced that Roger is going to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York, I would feel justified (and obliged) to murder him, because like most of the people I know, I have the goal to prevent millions of innocents from dying. And yet, if I believed that Roger is going to do this on bad or non-existent evidence, the odds are that I would be killing an innocent man for no good reason. There would be nothing wrong with my goal (One True or not), only with my rationality. I don't see any fundamental difference between this scenario and the one we've been discussing.

Are you trying to be funny? Note that not all of the 70% would agree that belief or its lack sends people to Hell. See also.

ETA: If you doubt what I said about beliefs regarding those "doomed to eternal torment," see "Many religions can lead to eternal life," in this sizeable PDF.

The Creed is a part of a larger whole, not meant to form a religion on its own. It doesn't include the great majority of the usual reasons for believing in Christianity, which I would need to address to convince people that it is wrong; it states (some of) the conclusions Christians believe in but not their premises. A Christian wouldn't try to convert someone just by telling them the Nicene Creed, without even any evidence for believing in the Creed.

However, on further reflection: I must partially retract what I said. The 'quite easy' proof I had in mind is not universal: like any proof, its form and existence depend on who that proof is supposed to convince. It's famously hard to convince a Christian of a disproof of Christianity; it's also very easy to convince someone who is already an atheist, or an Orthodox Jew, that the the same disproof is valid.

Every human alive has heard of the concept of religion, and of some concrete religions (if not necessarily of Christianity), and usually either believes in one or explicitly does not believe in any. So it could be said there's no perfectly impartial judge of the validity of a proof. I believe that a neutral, rational, unbiased reasoner would be convinced by my simple proofs; but even apart from not being to test this, a Christian could argue that I'm sneaking assumptions into my definition of a neutral reasoner. (After all, every reasoner must start out with some facts, and if Christianity is true, why not start out believing in it?)

I retract my previous claim. I don't have a "quite easy" proof any given religion is false, if by proof we mean "some words that would quite easily convince a believer in that religion to stop believing in it."

tl;dr It's difficult to get people to change their mind :-)

I would be interested to see a sketch of the evidence in question for atheism. (Not so interested for utilitarianism -- values versus facts.)

But if the point you're making is an instance of the general schema "there is evidence against almost anything, and if you collect just the evidence that goes one way you can often make it look quite convincing" then I agree, but plead guilty only to not wanting to weigh my comment down with hedging. One of the things I meant by "good reasoning" was not doing that :-).

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

Eugine is downvoting my comments everywhere. My 30-day karma is currently at -44; if I am interpreting the percentages right then my "non-Eugine" 30-day karma is probably somewhere around +270. (But I suspect that may be inflated a bit, because some people may be applying "corrective" upvotes to some of my comments that have been Eugined.)

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.

That's a good observation. My feeling is that the "argument from evil" against religions that claim there's a supremely good supremely powerful being is extremely convincing to almost everyone who doesn't belong to such a religion -- but of course lots of people who don't belong to one such religion may belong to a different such religion and therefore be unfavourably disposed towards the AfE.

If good reasoning is supposed to mean that you mention all the evidence, then your argument is question begging

It is supposed to mean something along those lines, but if you think I'm begging the question then I think you are probably misunderstanding the nature of my argument. Let me recap, and try to make the connective tissue of the argument more visible; my apologies if this makes it laborious.

• DanArmak said (roughly) that atheism is not only correct but in some sense obviously correct; in other words, that the answer to "why are so many people religious?" is less "because anti-religious arguments are subtle and hard to understand" and more "because religious people are unable to accept even easy clear arguments if they lead to irreligious conclusions".
• Various people disagreed.
• I am agreeing (roughly and provisionally) with Dan, and suggesting a way to make his claim more precise: the idea is that (1) there are anti-religious arguments convincing to any given person (you just have to avoid arguments that they can see refuting their own religion) and (2) that isn't because you can find crappy arguments tailored to any given person's biases and errors -- the arguments in question are actually good ones in some objective sense.
• The people disagreeing with Dan mostly agree with him that in fact religions are probably wrong, and I think they agree with him that there are "good in the abstract" arguments leading to that conclusion. The point of their disagreement is that those arguments are unconvincing to many (otherwise) intelligent and reasonable people, and that if you want to claim an argument is easy to verify then the fact that it fails to convince many intelligent and reasonable people is a big obstacle.
• The point of my comment, therefore, was to suggest a way to surmount that obstacle, by providing evidence that each person's unconvincedness is an artefact of their own religious commitments rather than an indication that the arguments are weak or difficult.
• And the reason why I stipulated that the arguments in question are "good reasoning in the abstract" is just to exclude the possibility that the individually-tailored arguments are cheaty ones that target individuals' cognitive weaknesses, rather than anti-cheaty ones that avoid individuals' cognitive weaknesses.

lottery

That's a valid point in the abstract, but its validity depends on the actual numbers in question. If you have a million people and a million arguments each showing Pr(a given person wins) <= 10^-6 then indeed that isn't enough to be any sort of evidence that no one will win; but if you could show that each person's winning probability was <= 10^-9, it would be. In the case we're dealing with here, I suggest that we can probably find (let's say) no more than 100 varieties of theism (I know that some earlier comments said "religion" but I think "theism" is what's actually under discussion here), and an argument for each showing Pr(that version of theism) <= 10^-4, in which case it follows that Pr(any of them) <= 1%.