I fear that finding a way of attacking fundamentalist Islam while not being villified as one form of evil (sellout) or another (apostate) may not be possible.

And if it is not possible, then all your efforts at accomplish it will prove wasted efforts. Efforts that could have been spent working on something that is possible.

There are PLENTY of people who work against fundamentalist islam, some from within moderate islam, some from a position that abandoning islam is the only reasonable choice. I think you would do better finding good information about your choices for resisting by studying these people and what they do and how they do it and what they say. As a non-believer, I still find I have great respect for BOTH believers and non-believers who work against fundamentalist stupidity, violent oppression of non-believers, non-education of women, crappy education of men. I have worked with many believers who I respect greatly as good people and good scientists, enough to know that the moderate believer is not an an enemy of rationality the way a fundamentalist is. And I reach this conclusion as a non-believer.

Yes! I think the essence of Ghandi's non-violent opposition to the British was to take the British at their word. To repeat (a carefully selected) bunch of their own ideas back to them. To make them realize if they wanted to think of themselves as "good" they were going to have to address the inconsistencies between what they said and what they did.

This has also been an important part of the advance of civil rights for racial minorities in the U.S. in my personal experience. It is hard to totally ignore someone who is spouting words you believe in and not simultaneously threatening you with violence.

Ultimately in the U.S. and the West generally, these experiences of accepting differences, of inclusion, have lead to a new ideology of a positive value associated with diversity, not just a "tolerance" of it. I don't know if you can live in the U.S. these days, with Thai restaurants and Indian and Chinese engineers, British rock stars and Polynesian beauties, and not recognize the great positive utility that diversity provides to the cooperative human enterprise.

To me "live and let live" may be a statement of the most basic rational precept ever. It lets you win and it lets them win.

Sure. The trick is not to confuse it with "live and let suffer and die."

I will argue against you, but let me first tell you that your exposure to this stuff means there is a lot of stuff you know that I don't know. I'll argue against to perhaps provide some support for some alternative approaches that might give a good idea when considered.

Many of those governments ardently desire their intelligent, rational people leaving, and will even facilitate that movement. They get in the way of a stable tyranny.

Unfortunately, there is probably no winning in the short term. Cuba is a case American's no something about. The US Gov't has tried starving Cuba (by embargoing trade) and their brains have been highly drained. Even so, Cuba persists in a very non-free state even as its dictator is old and weak.

It SEEMS to me that the community of rich and effective Cubans in the United States do much more towards putting pressure on the Cuban government than do any "dissidents" who stay behind and operate with few resources, and quietly enough to avoid arrest. I certainly don't know for sure.

More importantly, the more they appropriate a foreign culture, the more the locals will see them as "foreign". A "Return of the Elites" might not be welcome: see Iran after the Shah was deposed,

This is something you "fight" against by not fighing against it. Appropriate the foreign culture and stay connected to your friends and relatives back home. Be a "reasonable" non-Muslim. Give them all the reason in the world to see that a non-Muslim is not the devil creature they think. But it will take a long time, and there is probably no getting around that. Another path would be to pretend to be a moderate Muslim. Certainly many westerners pretend to a level of christianity that is so weak as to be nearly non-existent, because it doesn't cost much to do so and gains you some benefits. I would probably do that if I had to, I don't perceive the price I pay for being atheist-agnostic to be even vaguely high enough to make faking it worthwhile, but I live in California, not Morocco.

Capitalism as the source of a nation's prosperity might also be a red herring: notice how America and Africa are full of perfectly capitalist, utterly miserable nations.

I believe a consistent practice of rationality will move you away from dogmatic fights. Of course you are right, places that could reasonably be called capitalist do not all do equally as well by any means. There are other principles at play that are important. In my opinion, having read a lot, markets are very important. Better to have relatively open economic competition in markets with few or no government granted monopolies. WHen the government does intervene, MUCH more efficient to intervene in a way that preserves markets (charging for licenses to emit pollutants instead of mandating certain levels of pollution or certain non-polluting technologies for example).

But of course the big thing is the extent to which the government picks winners and losers. If a friend of the king is getting rich in business, the less bad part is that his money is coming from overcharging the people, the more bad part is the overall drag this kind of interference creates reduces productivity to fractions of the levels achieved in western countries. Western countries certainly have problems picking winners and losers, but it is done from a baseline of so many openly competitive markets that its impact, while bad, is simply not on the same scale as what happens in a third world country.

The west's advantage is not ideological it is technical. Markets WORK to find optima and get the most out of all the economic inputs, that is a technology. To the extent that a call for Capitalism sounds like an ideological call, it is totally rational to resist it. Just don't replace it with an even worse ideology, an ideology that promotes the use of way inferior technologies.

I am a "typical" american grew up in New York. When I was 18 and my sister was 17, my sister and I visited my father for a few weeks who was working in Esfahan. The shah was still in charge, it was the late 1970s.

My sister was a beautiful young woman with blond hair. Despite being warned by other non-Iranians that when we went in to see Esfahan she should dress modestly, she went out in a sleeveless dress because it was warm and sunny. Angry old men spat at her (at least one anyway) and the young men brushed up against her and copped feels.

The idea that you can manage the strong sexual and social urges men feel in the presence of attractive women by keeping the women uneducated, locked away, and covered when they are out is ludicrous, wasteful of more than half of the human resources a society has, plus pretty crappy for the women. Providing even the slightest respect towards this call for "modesty" is a strategic mistake. Well, maybe the slightest respect, an attractive dress wtih a moderate amount of cleavage showing is a better idea than a thong and a push-up bra for our rationality spokesmodel.

Plus I enjoy being oddly specific. It feels livelier to me than stilted generalities.

So I have been checking laws around the world regarding Apostasy... the approach Muslims take ... will get you killed.

Laws are extremely weak evidence about what will happen to you. I strongly advise you to avoid looking at laws, and not just for this project.

Possibly of interest: The Young Atheist's Handbook-- an account of becoming an atheist by a man who grew up in a Bangladeshi neighborhood in London.

I agree that getting out is the best option for someone who lives under a violently religious government, but that getting out may not be feasible or may be a long term project. I assume we're going to have some martyrs.

Keep in mind the idea that Rationalists Win. Rationalism is a collection of methods for knowing more and using that knowledge to get more of what you want. If you learn that greeting the local police with "Allahu Akhbar" will lower your chance of being arrested, then all other things being equal, it is quite rational to greet them that way.

Extending that, unless you have a particular plan in mind, you should not put yourself in danger merely to avoid "lying" about your connection to or sympathy with or hatred of certain ideas.

Personally, I am a big fan of getting out of there. Every country whos intelligent youth leaves in noticable numbers is being sent a message that is received at some level by both the populace and the government of that country. Either that society fixes itself and its intelligent people stay, or it whithers and has smaller and smaller impact on the world as a whole, but at least the steady flux of intelligent people out of it provides an "infrastructure" that future intelligent youth can use to get out more efficiently.

Over the last 40 years, the west has made tremendous inroads against the communist oppression. Soviet Union is GONE. Communist China is a capitalist success story. Defectors and then later students leaving to study were a tremendously valuable part of that process.

If you need to stay in an evnironment where wearing a vertically striped shirt might get you killed, by all means wear a horizontally striped shirt. That is the rational choice.

More importantly, concerning Less Wrong itself, should we try to distance ourselves from atheism and anti-religiousness as such? Is this baggage too inconvenient, or is it too much a part of what we stand for?

I think it would be a mistake to distance ourselves from these. A tool the religious use is to pretend disagreement with them is crazy. Countering this idea is CENTRAL to rationality. Being afraid of being sent to hell for eternity is no more "evidence" that god exists than is being afraid of tigers evidence that there is one in your back yard. A central reason why the scientific method has succeeded so remarkably is that it automatically enforces the rule that just because you want something to be true doesn't make it true, and indeed is not even evidence for its truth. If anything, it is evidence that you need to be more skeptical of the idea if you want to get it right to counteract your own bias.

In my opinion, the best advantages rationality can gain is a totally reasonable intelligent well spoken blond woman wearing sleeveless dresses smiling and explaining with devastating clarity just how much sense atheism makes. The reason this makes the mullahs want to spit at her and kill her is because it is a threat to what they are selling, which is precisely why rationalists should keep doing it.

So, let's take this hypothetical (harrumph) youth. They see irrationality around them, obvious and immense, they see the waste and the pain it causes. They'd like to do something about it. How would you advise them to go about it?

My advice would be, roughly: "When you infer opportunities to reduce waste and pain, and the expected cost of taking those opportunities is one you are willing to pay, and the expected value of those opportunities is positive, take them."

Which is also the advice I would give to pretty much everyone else who wants to do something about waste and pain.

More importantly, concerning Less Wrong itself, should we try to distance ourselves from atheism and anti-religiousness as such? Is this baggage too inconvenient, or is it too much a part of what we stand for?

It seems unlikely to provide any benefits, and the costs (in terms of disrupting local interactions) seem high.