Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.

Yet, when a person of even moderate cleverness wishes to deceive you, this "strength" can be turned against you. Context is everything.

As Donald DeMarco asks in "Are Your Lights On?", WHO is it that is bringing me this problem?

...what if we all have some form of brain damage in common, so that none of us notice some simple and obvious fact?

Aren't things "obvious" by virtue of being noticed (or noticeABLE) by nearly everyone? Not trying to be difficult, but just trying to wrap my head around the idea that we could, all of us, be suffering such a severe cognitive malfunction. (I am thinking, here, of the liar's paradox.) And trying to wrap my head around the idea that now we could sit here in front of our computers and say anything worthwhile about it.

But for the sake of playing the game: "There are no coincidences."

I've heard of several. I don't know stats on what proportion of Bible scholars de-convert.

Bart D. Ehrman - author of a book saying lots of the New Testament was forged

Francesca Stavrakopoulou (unclear when she became atheist)

Robert Price - went from Baptist minister to Cthulu mythologist. Not kidding.

Jacques Berlinerblau, who does say he knows few openly atheist biblical scholars.

Welcome!

If by "rationalist", the LW community means someone who believes it is possible and desirable to make at least the most important judgements solely by the use of reason operating on empirically demonstrable facts

You'll be relieved to know that's not quite the Less Wrong dogma; if you observe that your conscious deliberations make worse decisions in a certain sphere than your instincts, then (at least until you find a better conscious deliberation) you should rely on your instincts in that domain.

LWers are generally optimistic about applying conscious deliberation/empirical evidence/mathematical models in most cases besides immediate social decisions, though.

All the kinds of knowledge you describe are subclasses of rational knowledge. Is there irrational knowledge?

The preponderance of the evidence would seem to be that he really did exist.

Bible scholars have a consensus that this is the case, although whether they are doing any actual scholarship with regard to the issue is questionable. Atheists by and large do not become Bible scholars, and the mind-killing effects of religion mean that theists tend to do notably poor scholarship in this particular area.

However when a rationalist tries to drill down to the actual evidence you find that nothing is there, apart from Bible scholars reading the Bible and saying "this Paul guy seems legit, I don't think he'd have made that up".

Atheists by and large do not become Bible scholars

No, but many Bible scholars become atheists after they realize how nonsensical their study material is.

It seems likely to me that there was some person who served as the nucleus for a Jesus myth, just as it seems likely there was a real Briton general who served as the nucleus for a King Arthur myth. But we have no way of knowing anything about either, and I don't see that it matters much either way.

What you may not appreciate is that some RC beliefs, while incredible to outsiders, nevertheless are logically inseparable from other beliefs that are shared with other Christians; once abandoned, other cracks form, and it all falls down, including parts which are widely accepted as true.

Internal consistency is a virtue to be sure, although differences in degree of internal consistency between Christian sub-sects all of whose beliefs are based on multiple irrational and/or self-contradictory premises do not mean a great deal to me personally.

RC is, as you say, the religion which "tried hardest to rationalise" all its beliefs, depending on the absolute minimum of non-rational arguments (i.e., from sacred scripture or human authority). It does this with a vocabulary which, I admit, is extremely challenging to the uninitiated. (Aristotelian/Thomistic logic and hylemorphism.) Nonetheless, within that philosophical system, it is quite consistent. It's like picking up a book on string theory -- you ain't gonna "get it" on the first pass (nor the second pass, in all likelihood.)

As a philosopher I think that it's good intellectual exercise to get to grips with bad arguments like those the Catholic church use. However there's no truth in those arguments to "get", and there are other forms of intellectual exercise which might well be more beneficial for the general LW readership.

(Sorta off-topic) I was not aware that people doubted the existence of the founder of Buddhism. If he did not exist, could a reasonable religion be attributed to him? <scratches head> :-)

A religion could be the most rational and consistent of religions if its sole departure from reality was a fictional founder. Christianity, for example, has a fictional founder (the Biblical Jesus never existed according to the available evidence nor anyone substantially like him) but has lots of other departures from reality as well.

Catholicism has an interesting intellectual culture in that they do make a real effort to tie together the grab-bag of kooky beliefs that make up Catholicism with an apparently logical structure. From inside the Catholic culture they are even apparently successful, although from outside the Catholic culture it's immediately obvious that their "logical" arguments attempting to derive apostolic succession, papal infallibility, Mary being without sin, confession to an ordained member of the Catholic church being necessary to avoid eternal torture in a very specifically-imagined Hell and so on from Biblical texts are very weak.

It's almost but not quite analytic philosophy, in the same sort of way that a cargo cult almost but not quite emulates an airfield.

I don't agree with the grandparent. The versions of Buddhism that didn't allow supernatural accretions to build up around the philosophy of the (real or fictional) founder of Buddhism seem more rational and consistent to me than the self-contradcitory business of an all-loving, all-powerful God ritually sacrificing his son who is also himself so he could forgive humans for following the impulses he gave them and spare them from the eternal torture he would otherwise subject them to. However I can see how someone could say something like the grandparent and not be totally wrong. It's certainly the religion that has tried hardest to rationalise it's idiotic doctrines as far as I know.

it has been rightly said that Catholicism is the most rational and consistent of all the religions.

What are you talking about? That's nonsense.