When an LW contributor is in need of an example of something that (1) is plainly, uncontroversially (here on LW, at least) very wrong but (2) an otherwise reasonable person might get lured into believing by dint of inadequate epistemic hygiene, there seems to be only one example that everyone reaches for: belief in God. (Of course there are different sorts of god-belief, but I don't think that makes it count as more than one example.) Eliezer is particularly fond of this trope, but he's not alone.

How odd that there should be exactly one example. How convenient that there is one at all! How strange that there isn't more than one!

In the population at large (even the smarter parts of it) god-belief is sufficiently widespread that using it as a canonical example of irrationality would run the risk of annoying enough of your audience to be counterproductive. Not here, apparently. Perhaps we-here-on-LW are just better reasoners than everyone else ... but then, again, isn't it strange that there aren't a bunch of other popular beliefs that we've all seen through? In the realm of politics or economics, for instance, surely there ought to be some.

Also: it doesn't seem to me that I'm that a much better thinker than I was a few years ago when (alas) I was a theist; nor does it seem to me that everyone on LW is substantially better at thinking than I am; which makes it hard for me to believe that there's a certain level of rationality that almost everyone here has attained, and that makes theism vanishingly rare.

I offer the following uncomfortable conjecture: We all want to find (and advertise) things that our superior rationality has freed us from, or kept us free from. (Because the idea that Rationality Just Isn't That Great is disagreeable when one has invested time and/or effort and/or identity in rationality, and because we want to look impressive.) We observe our own atheism, and that everyone else here seems to be an atheist too, and not unnaturally we conclude that we've found such a thing. But in fact (I conjecture) LW is so full of atheists not only because atheism is more rational than theism (note for the avoidance of doubt: yes, I agree that atheism is more rational than theism, at least for people in our epistemic situation) but also because

Related on OB: Lying to Kids The Third Alternative

My wife and I are planning to have kids, so of course we've been going through the usual sorts of debates regarding upbringing. We wondered briefly, will we raise our children as atheists? It's kindof a cruel experiment, as folks tend to use their own experiences to guide raising children, and both of us were raised Catholic. Nonetheless, it was fairly well settled after about 5 minutes of dialogue that atheist was the way to go.

Then we had the related discussion of whether to teach our children about Santa Claus. After hours of debate, we decided we'd both have to think on the question some more. It's still been an open question for years now.

Should we teach kids that Santa Claus exists? This isn't a new question, by any means. But it's now motivated by this thread about rationalist origin stories. Note that many of the posters mark the 'rationalist awakening' as the time they realized God doesn't exist. The shock that everybody, including their parents, were wrong and/or lying to them was enough to motivate them to pursue rationality and truth.

If those same children were never taught about God, Santa Claus, and other falsehoods, would they have become rationalists, or would they have contented themselves with playing better video games?  If the child never realized there's no Santa Claus, would we have a reason to say, "You're growing up and I'm proud of you"?