when the stories found in the Bible were first told, were they claims of truth or mostly persuasion tricks?

I have no idea. Things were so vastly different back then I can't possibly even mount an educated guess about that. What difference does it make how it started? Today, at least in the U.S., I think it's a defensibly hypothesis that what people call "spiritual experiences" are largely about community and shared subjective experience.

spirituality also claims to have insight into some factual matters (history, for example) and moral dilemmas.

Sure, but that's not the subject I'm addressing. The subject I'm addressing is the belief that many people in the rational community seem to hold (Dawkins being the most prominent example) that the only possible reason anyone could even profess to believe in God is because they are an idiot.

this doesnt look at all like the spirituality found in the world around us.

Yes, that's mostly true (though I am personally acquainted with a number of people who profess to believe in God but who are otherwise seem perfectly rational). I'm not saying that the conclusions reached by religious people are correct. I'm simply advancing the hypothesis that religious people reach the conclusions that they do is in part that they have different subjective experiences than non-relgious people.

Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?

That's a little bit of an oversimplified caricature, but yes, I do more or less believe that this is true. Moreover, I think there is evidence to support this position beyond just the intuitive argument I've presented here. The idea that religion evolved as a way of maintaining social cohesion is hardly original with me. I'm frankly a little bit surprised that I'm getting pushback on this; I had assumed this was common knowledge.

I have started writing a comment multiple times, only to remove what I wrote mid-sentence. I think I figured out why that is: your post is tempting us to argue against the existence of experiences that cannot be communicated (do you mean: 'not perfectly communicated' or 'not even hinted at that they exist'? Communication is not binary), and with the sentences:

The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic.

you attempt to ban a whole class of arguments that might well be relevant. Your post is a wonderful piece of rhetoric (although some of the analogies get stretched a bit thin), but it hardly communicates anything. Other than

people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences

there doesn't seem to be a single claim in the whole text. Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?

I have seen this argument on LessWrong before, and don't think the other explanations are as clear as they can be. They are correct though, so my apologies if this just clutters up the thread.

The Bayesian way of looking at this is clear: the prior probability of any particular sequence is 1/2^[large number]. Alice sees this sequence and reports it to Bob. Presumably Alice intends on telling Bob the truth about what she saw, so let's say that there's a 90% chance that she will not make a mistake during the reporting. The other 10% will cover all cases ranging from misremembering/misreading a flip to outright lying. The point is that if Alice is lying, this 10% has to be divided up between the other 2^[large number]-1 other possible sequences - if Alice is going to lie, any particular sequence is very unlikely to be presented by her as the true sequence, since there are a lot of ways for her to lie. So, assuming that Alice was intending to speak the truth, her giving that sequence is very strong (in my example 9*(2^[large number]-1):1) evidence that that particular sequence was indeed the true one over any specific other sequence - 'coincidentally' precisely strong enough to turn the posterior belief of Bob that that sequence is correct to 90%.

A fun side remark is that the above also clearly shows why Bob should be more skeptical when Alice presents sequences like HHHHHHHHHH or HTHTHTHTHTHT - if Alice were planning on lying these are exactly the sequences that she might pick with a greater than uniform probabilty out of all the sequences that were not thrown, and therefore each possible actual sequence contributes a higher-than-average amount of probability that Alice would present one of these special sequences, so the fact that Alice informs Bob of such a sequence is weaker evidence for this particular sequence over any other one than it would be in the regular case, and Bob ends up with a lower posterior that the sequence is actually correct.

I am not convinced that there exists anything like aleatory uncertainty - even QM uncertainty lies in the map. Having said that I agree with your point: that this doesn't matter, and value of information is the relevant measure (which is clearly not binary).

Having read your response to Dagon I am now confused - you state that:

This is in contrast to Eliezer's point that "Uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory"

but above you only show the orthogonal point that allowing for irresolvable uncertainty can provide useful models, regardless of the existence of such uncertainty. If this is your main point (along with introducing the standard notation used in these models), how is this a contrast with uncertainty being in the map? Lots of good models have elements that can not be found in real life, for example smooth surfaces, right angles or irreducible macroscopic building blocks.

I don't understand why there is so much resistance to the idea that stating "X with probability P(X)" also implies "~X with probability 1-P(X)". The point of assigning probabilities to a prediction is that it represents your state of belief. Both statements uniquely specify the same state of belief, so to treat them differently based on which one you wrote down is irrational. Once you accept that these are the same statement, the conclusion in my post is inevitable, the mirror symmetry of the calibration curve becomes obvious, and given that symmetry, all lines must pass through the point (0.5,0.5).

Imagine the following conversation:

A: "I predict with 50% certainty that Trump will not win the nomination".

B: "So, you think there's a 50% chance that he will?"

A: "No, I didn't say that. I said there's a 50% chance that he won't."

B: "But you sort of did say it. You said the logically equivalent thing."

A: "I said the logically equivalent thing, yes, but I said one and I left the other unsaid."

B: "So if I believe there's only a 10% chance Trump will win, is there any doubt that I believe there's a 90% chance he won't?

A: "Of course, nobody would disagree, if you said there's a 10% chance Trump will win, then you also must believe that there's a 90% chance that he won't. Unless you think there's some probability that he both will and will not win, which is absurd."

B: "So if my state of belief that there's a 10% chance of A necessarily implies I also believe a 90% chance of ~A, then what is the difference between stating one or the other?"

A: "Well, everyone agrees that makes sense for 90% and 10% confidence. It's only for 50% confidence that the rules are different and it matters which one you don't say."

B: "What about for 50.000001% and 49.999999%?"

A: "Of course, naturally, that's just like 90% and 10%."

B: "So what's magic about 50%?"

"It takes massive amounts of evidence to convince me that the offers in each of your games are sincere and accurate." - Again, this only works if you assume we are modelling the real world, not perfect celestial beings with perfect knowledge. I have made no claims about whether perfect theoretical rationality can exist in theory in a world with certain "realism" constraints, just that if logic is the only constraint, perfect rationality doesn't exist in general.

The whole point of assigning 50% probability to a claim is that you literally have no idea whether or not it will happen. So of course including X or ~X in any statement is going to be arbitrary. That's what 50% means.

However, this is not solved by doubling up on your predictions, since now (by construction) your predictions are very dependent. I don't understand the controversy about Scott getting 0/3 on 50% predictions - it even happens to perfectly calibrated people 1/8 times, let alone real humans. If you have a long list of statements you are 50% certain about, you have literally no reason to not put one side of an issue instead of the other side on your prediction list. If, however, afterwards it turns out that significantly less than half of your (arbitrarily chosen) sides turned out to be wrong, you probably aren't very good at recognising when you are 50% confident (to make this more clear, imagine Scott had gotten 0/100 instead of 0/3 on his 50% predictions).

How very deep. But if I'm not mistaken the original argument around Chesterton's fence is that somebody had gone through great efforts to put a fence somewhere, and presumably would not have wasted that time if it would be useless anyway. In your example, "the common practice of taking down Chesterton fences", this is not the case. The general principle is to not undo that which others have worked hard for to create, unless you are certain that it is useless/counterproductive. Nobody worked hard on making sure people could remove fences without understanding them (or at the very least I'm willing to claim that this is counterproductive), so this principle is not protected.

I'm not convinced. It takes massive amounts of evidence to convince me that the offers in each of your games are sincere and accurate. In particular it takes an infinite amount of evidence to prove that your agents can keep handing out increasing utility/tripling/whatever. When something incredible seems to happen, follow the probability.

I'm reminded of the two-envelope game, where seemingly the player can get more and more money(/utility) by swapping envelopes back and forth. Of course the solution is clear if you assume (any!) prior on the money in the envelopes, and the same is happening if we start thinking about the powers of your game hosts.