If I were to take all of my friends and divide them into two groups, there are plenty of criteria I could choose, but probably the most relevant slice would be between my friends who believe in God, and my friends who don’t.

Many in the believer group know each other as well. The evangelical Christian community in my city is fairly tight-knit. Every once in a while I’ll meet someone new, I’ll mention offhand something about church, it’ll become the topic of conversation, and suddenly we discover that we share a dozen mutual friends.

My non-believer friends come from all walks of life. My old friends from high school fit in this category; so do many of the friends I’ve met through university or part-time jobs. There’s no tight-knit community here. I wouldn’t describe many of them as rationalists, particularly, but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.

Something about this bothers me. Maybe it’s because I find it so refreshing to be with a group of people who are relentlessly positive about life, who constantly remind one another to be positive, and who offer concrete help rather than judgement. Once, when another of our friends couldn’t pay her rent, my Christian friend and I got up at four, took out five hundred dollars in cash at a convenience store, and biked to her house to leave it anonymously in her mailbox before I left for my six am shift at work. The high lasted all day. I can’t think of any other community where this would happen, where it would even be socially acceptable.

I met people at church who had survived the worst circumstances; they had been abused, they had been addicts, they had been homeless. But aside from the concrete help they’d found at church, they’d found some kind of hope as well. They believed that they could succeed. I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life, and I’ve never had reason to doubt that I would succeed, or that people would be there to help me if I ever failed. But for people who’ve only seen evidence that they will fail and be stepped on, the benefits of being told that God loves them unconditionally seem to be non-trivial.

Now to contrast with my non-religious friends; this isn’t universally true, but I’ve seen a trend of general negative-ness. This attitude can be self-directed, i.e. complaining about work or school or relationships without any effort to find solutions. I know some very unhappy people, and it seems insane to me that they just sit back and take it, month after month. The negative attitude can also be directed outwards into biting sarcasm and rude, judgemental comments about others. This often comes from people who seem happy enough with their own lives. Maybe I didn’t notice this as much before I started going to church, where it became obvious in its absence.

I have the same tendencies to criticize and judge as anyone, but at least I notice them and try to keep them in check. I try to ask myself if it really helps to criticize someone. Does whatever I think they’re doing wrong really affect me? Is it my business to correct them? Would they listen to criticism? If I’m a reliable example, most people hate being criticized. It takes a conscious effort to step back and see criticism in a positive light. I try to take this step, and maybe most rationalists-in-the-making do the same, but that’s not the general population, and starting with a criticism tends to close people off and put them on the defensive. The last question I ask myself is, do I want to help them by suggesting a change, or do I only want to vent my own frustration? Venting doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help me, because for me anyway, focusing on the negative side of an issue tends to flip my entire mindset into the negative. And negative attitudes are contagious. If one person at work is ranting about a bad breakup or a fight with their family, I’ll often catch myself brooding about someone or something I’m annoyed with. If I’m lucky and I’m paying attention, I notice the subliminal messaging before it really gets to be. Sometimes I feel like barking “hey, keep your problems to yourself, I’m trying to be positive here.” But again, if I’m paying attention to my own reactions, I ask myself if it’ll really help to snap at them, and the answer is no, so I’ll try to be an understanding listener.

These are things I do consciously, but since I stopped going to church regularly, I’ve noticed that it’s more of an effort. It feels like I’m holding up a heavy weight alone, going through my day talking to roommates and classmates and co-workers who don’t make any special effort to be positive or non-judgemental or helpful. And as soon as I let down my guard, I slip back into the trap of reacting to criticism defensively instead of constructively, of snapping back on reflex, of making excuses for why I was rude to someone or left my dirty dishes in the sink. I hate the way I act in this default mode, but it’s easy to make excuses for that too. I tell myself that I’m tired, that I’m burnt out, that I can’t be everything to everyone. I tell myself it’s not fair that I try so much harder than everyone else.

At church, there was a marked lack of excuses. The general attitude was that you could be as strong as you needed to be, because it wasn’t your strength, it was God’s strength. The way I see it, it was more the combined strength of a community united by a common ideal. It was like a self-help group, but without the stigma. (Maybe the stigma is imaginary; I just know that I have a negative emotional reaction to self-help books and websites. I know this is probably counterproductive, but I can’t seem to get rid of it.)

I talk to some of my friends, the non-religious ones, and I notice that maybe half the time they’re grumpy or upset or angry or offended, and they don’t stop to think about it, or take the step away that would allow them to question and overcome those feelings. My Christian friends aren’t perfect, and they do occasionally slip into anger and frustration, but they often notice. They often bring it up afterwards, in front of the group, as an example of something they need to work on.

This is why, even though I don’t believe in God and would probably be incapable of it at this point, the last thing I want to do is judge people who believe. A lot of the time, they’ve found something that helps them. This is why I found it instrumentally rational, for six months, to go to youth group once a week and sing songs about Jesus. Happiness is a hard thing to pin down, but I liked myself better during that time. It’s easier to be generous when everyone is being generous around you; it’s easier to be kind and helpful when everyone else is acting that way too. It feels like being held accountable.

I don’t really know what this means. It’s hard to generalize, because I’m talking about people in my age group; most of us are poor and not settled in our lives, without firmly developed social networks. Maybe later on in life, people can make their own tight-knit communities without religion as binding glue; my parents, for example, have an incredibly extensive social group. And I certainly don’t want to imply that all Christian organizations are as open and welcoming as the one I attended. I’m sure than plenty of people have had bad experiences. But what I’ve seen suggests to me that my church (a Pentacostal evangelical Christian group, by the way) served a function in our city that wasn’t being filled by anything else.

It’s limited, of course, by the fact that its founders believe the Bible is literally true, even if they don’t apply that belief thoroughly. (This occasionally involves a tricky kind of doublethink, for example a person who denounces homosexuality when asked directly but who holds nothing against their homosexual friends.) Could the principles of rationality prompt a group of people to form this kind of community? I don’t know. But until then, I’m going to keep hanging out with Christians and sharing their positive thoughts.  

Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism¹ seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?

I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe², nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.

It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.

Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul³ matters very much. Does it?

Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.

Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.

¹ Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.

² I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.

³ Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).

I have been recently entertaining myself with a 3-day non-stop binge of Theist vs. Atheist debates, On the atheist side: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Denett, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers. On the theist corner: Dinesh D'Souza, William Lane Craig, Alistair McGrath, Tim Keller, and (unfortunately) Nassim Nicholas Taleb. One of the interesting points that comes up, often by Hitchens, is what I call the "Bodycount Argument". The atheist will claim: "Look at all the deaths caused by religion: Crusades, Inquisition, Islamic fundamentalism, Japanese militarism, Conquests of the New World" and the list goes on and on. Then the Theist will claim: "Well, look at the Nazis, the Fascists, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge...". the Atheist then tries to reverse some of that, e.g. the Fascists were the catholic right wing, the SS were mostly confessing Catholics and Hitler had churches pray for him on his birthday, and, most tenuously, that the Soviets had the support of the orthodox church and used the pre-existing structures set up by the Czar to establish their power.

Some of that retort is convincing, some is not so much. You cannot really blame Soviet, Cambodian and Chinese massacres solely on religion. While they do at least manage to bring it to a tie, I suspect that the atheists follow this argument up suboptimally. My instinctive reaction would be "ok, so you proved that except for religion, communism leads to mass slaughter too. I have no problem doing away with both". But the Theists have a stronger form of their argument in which they claim that the crimes of communism are -because- of atheism, so a simple one-line retort won't work in all cases. We need to lay a deeper foundation for that claim to be convincing.

Enter single points of failure. The rudimentary definition, usually given in terms of computer networks, is that a single point of failure is that component which takes down the entire system when it fails. While the term has originated in computer science as far as I can tell, it can be applied to human networks as well. The strategy of Alexander the Great, at the battle of Issus, was instead of trying to defeat the entire, vastly ournumbering, Persian army in combat, to attack the Persian king Darius directly. When he was able to make him flee, the entire Persian army fell into disarray, with one side executing an orderly retreat, but the left flank completely disintegrated while being pursued by Alexander's cavalry. So while the term is new, the concept has been long known and has been used to great effect.

What I want to argue, is that all the examples cited by Theists and Atheists alike, are instances of a single point of -moral- failure. Here, instead of the system disintegrating or stopping to operate, it goes into a sequence of actions that when examined by an outside human observer, or even the participants themselves at a latter date, seem to be immoral, irrational, and akin to madness. The common point in all the examples is that a central organization, supported by a specific fanaticizing ideology, ordered the massacres to occur, and the people at the lower ranks, implemented those orders, despite perhaps individually knowing better.

My explanation of this, is that the lower-ranks had in effect outsourced their moral sense to their leadership. As with all centralised structures, when things go well, they go -really- well (assuming aligned incentives, greedy algorithms generally will not be as optimal as top-down ones), but when they go bad, they can be disastrous. The bigger the power of the network, the bigger the consequences. It is not hard to imagine why the outsourcing happened. Humans are tribal. I think very few, having observed the weekly rituals called 'football games' (whatever your definition of football is) would disagree. But humans are also moral. We have a rough set of rules that we tend to follow relatively consistently. What is of interest in these cases, is that an individual's tribalism completely overrode that individual's personal morality. And this happened repeatedly and reliably, throughout the ranks of each of these human networks.

Coming back to the original argument, if indeed tribalism trumps morality, and the above give us good reason to believe it does, then the theist argument that god put morality inside us comes into question. It does not explain why god saw fit to make our morality less powerful a motivator than our tribal instincts. But the biological explanation stands confirmed: If morality is a mechanism that was useful for intra-tribe interactions, then it would -have- to be suspended when the tribe was facing another. One can imagine the pacifist tribe being annihilated by the non-pacifist tribes around it or, lest I be accused of arguing for group selection, the individual pacifists being attacked both by their own tribe or the enemy tribe. Tribalists may disagree about who gets to live and who gets the resources, but they don't disagree about tribalism.

Recently, a video produced by Christians claimed that the future world would be Muslim. It hit 10 million hits in YouTube. The alarming demographics presented were proven mostly false and exaggerated both by BBC and Snopes. Yet, religion is such a powerful self-replicating memeplex that its competition against atheism deserves some analysis.

Leaving apart the aesthetic nicety of some religious rituals — which I respect —, it would be preferable to see a world with predominance of rationality instead of faith, brights instead of supers. Not just because I whimsically wish so, but because reason ensues atheism. Rationality is the primer here. With more rational agents, the more rationality propagates, and people’s maps will be more accurate. And that’s better for us, human beings*.

(* This sentence is a bit of a strong claim, especially because I am not defining exactly what I mean by ‘better’, and some existential pain might be expected as a consequence of being unaided by the crutches of faith and of being deprived of their cultural antibodies. Also, if happiness happens to be an important attribute of ‘better’, I am not sure to what extent being rational will make people happier. Some people are very ok choosing the blue pill. For the time being, let’s take it as an axiom. The claim that rational is better might deserve a separate post.)

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On the evening of August 14^th, 2006 a pair of Fox News journalists, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were seized by Islamic militants while on assignment in Gaza City.  Nothing was heard of them for nine days until a group calling themselves the Holy Jihad Brigades took credit for the kidnappings.  They issued an ultimatum, demanding the release of Muslims prisoners from American jails within a 72 hour time frame.  Their demands were not met.

But then a few days later the journalists were allowed to go free... but not before they’d been forced into converting to Islam at gunpoint, and had each videotaped a statement denouncing U.S. and Israeli foreign policy.

The war raged on.

A couple of kidnapped journalists is nothing new (certainly not three years after the fact) and aside from the happy ending this particular case wouldn’t worth mentioning if not for a unique twist that occurred after they returned home.  A fellow Fox News contributor, Sandy Rios, openly criticized the two men; she said that no true Christian would convert – falsely or otherwise – merely because they were threatened with death.  As she later explained to Bill Maher:*