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Sorry to be a terrible pedant, but isn't it 'orchiectomy' rather that 'oriechtomy'?
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Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"
Replace "Killing Joe", with say "not giving Joe a million dollars" in that argument, what changes?
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Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"
A million dollars is a lot more zero-sum than not killing someone - if I give you a million dollars I lose a million dollars. To make the analogy more accurate, you'd need to stipulate that Joe will kill me if I don't kill him.
Also, I don't think it's fair to ignore the fact that for most people, not killing someone is vastly easier to do at non-self-destructive costs. I appreciate that this is a quantitative argument rather than a categorical counterargument, but if we have atheists who base their sense of morality on a vague consequentialism that they can't quite fully articulate, that's still no worse than Robertson's (presumed) divine command theory, and they should be able to make such such arguments without being accused of hypocrisy for not also advocating actions that <i>would</i> score much worse under their vague consequentialism.
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Meetup : LessWrong Scotland
Dang, my first reasonably local one and I'm away in England that weekend. Well, hopefully next time.
I made it to this one and I'm Edinburgh based. If there's enough interest I'd be up for alternating Glasgow/Edinburgh
It's only a little less faff for me to get to Edinburgh than Glasgow, but I have far more people I can stay the night with there, so please keep me posted.
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Meetup : Glasgow (Scotland) Meetup
I exist. I'm actually more east coast, but it looks like attempts to set up an Edinburgh meet-up have fizzled out, so if I can make it to a future Glasgow one, I would be keen to come along.
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As a religious person myself, I have to say that's the one part of the Sequences that seems to me to be poorly fitted. (I haven't read them all, but in the ones I have read). Its inclusion seems to follow one of two patterns.
The first pattern is, "all religion is false and I do not have to explain why because it is obvious". These I ignore, as they give me no information to work from. (Your use of the phrase "religious delusions" I also class under this category).
The second pattern is, "I have known religious people who have fallen into this fallacy, this trap, this way of reasoning poorly, and have used it to support their claims". Again, this tells me nothing about whether or not God exists; it merely tells me that some people's arguments in favour of God's existence are flawed. It means nothing. I can give you a flawed argument for the proposition that 16/64 is equal to 1/4; the fact that my argument is flawed does not make 16/64 == 1/4 false.
...so, as far as I've so far seen, that's pretty much where things stand. The Sequences praise the virtues of clear thought, of looking at evidence before coming to a conclusion, of not writing the line at the bottom of the page until after you have written the argument on the page... and then, in this one matter, insist on giving the line at the bottom of the page and not the argument? It just gives the feeling of being tacked on, an atheist meme somehow caught up where it doesn't, strictly speaking, belong.
...maybe there's something in the parts I haven't yet read that explains this discreprency. I doubt it, because if there was I imagine it would be linked to a lot more often, but it is still possible.
I think (with the caveat that I've read a lot but not all of the sequences) that it is Yudkowsky's position that religions are specific manifestations of a whole cluster of more general failures of rationality, and that once someone truly internalises all of the best techniques for separating probable truths from probable untruths, it will be more-or-less impossible for that person to remain religious (unless, of course, they are sitting on a mountain of evidence in favour of the existence of one or more gods which has not been made available to the rest of us), and that it will be <i>obvious</i> that the specific claims of religions are false.
So yes, there is not much in there that explicitly rebuts the god hypothesis, but probably the closest thing to what you are looking for is <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/1e/raising_the_sanity_waterline/">Raising the Sanity Waterline,</a> which lists the ideas that ought to make discarding religions into one of the low-hanging fruits of any attempt at upgrading one's rationality.