This might sound obvious, but:

Spending time frequently with different groups of friends with different value systems, each of which (you believe) has an accurate map of different parts of the world.

My experience:

My rationalist friends help me inject more empiricism/anti-happy-death-spiral memes into my church experience; my church friends help me keep other memes like "non-smart people are still worthwhile," "actions perceived as demonstrating character and virtue aren't all just signalling," and of course the "no sex, no drugs" purity meme.

I am in favor of all of the preceding memes but tend to forget each of them over time if I spend too long in a community that doesn't observe them.

This seems to be the crux of your distinction.

Under the willpower theory, morality means the struggle to consistently implement a known set of rules and actions.

Whereas under the taste theory, morality is a journey to discover and/or create a lifestyle fitting your personal ethical inclinations.

We should not ask "which is right?" but "but how much is each right? In what areas?"

I'm not sure of the answer to that question.

I was under the impression that was a book that quotes lots of studies, rather than actually a study.

truth thar religion is a bad thing.

truth that religion is a bad thing.

Eliezer pointed this out somewhere, but I can't seem to find a reference.

Google "religiosity correlate charitable giving." You'll find some. Why are you referring to Eliezer instead of actual studies?

Consequentialism is pretty much common sense.

Er, no, not really. It's not widely accepted among the general public ("the ends justify the means" has negative connotations, for good reason) and it's a point of serious contention among LWers.

but not everything I'd beneficial

but not everything is beneficial .

Most Christians would be upset by how frankly LessWrong calls them idiots.

Is it common to call Christians idiots here? I know it's somewhat common to call individual elements of religion idiotic, but that's very different.

This frequently results in stupid beliefs, like a support of the death penalty,

The death penalty is not one-sided.

Overall thoughts: lumping all religions together seems silly. The mainline Christian churches are closer to atheists than they are to medieval Christians. There are atheist religions out there as well as religions that are atheist-friendly. Eastern 'religions' like Daoism are very dissimilar from Western religions like Christianity or Islam, to the point that I don't think an analysis of common Christian experience will be very useful in analyzing them.

The conclusion also seems to not match up with the article. If the basic idea you want to communicate is "the best deconversion is not offensive logic but polite and happy atheists," then write a post about that, instead of making some generalizations about Christianity.

Consider Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, etc. These men combined methods which claimed to be scientific. Corbusier tried to maximize population density; Moses, to maximize road construction.

But they were working in very intricate, complicated systems and ignored the effects that maximizing their favorite metric would have on everything else. They dictated everything from the center and ignored local knowledge.

This is what we call dangerous knowledge.

The failure of these methods -- "the projects" housing inspired by Corbusier, Moses's neighborhood destruction, helped trigger -- as far as I understand -- the current focus on aesthetics and intuition. It's a reaction to that, a "risk-averse" strategy to picking the wrong metrics and trying to maximize/minimize them.

A parallel example might be Robert McNamara and the whiz kids turning into the Best and the Brightest in Vietnam.

[nitpick]

Exchanges are easier to follow if you bold the person speaking.

Also, this is technically not correct:

The FDA is supposed to approve new drugs and procedures if the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. If they actually did this, the number of people saved by new drugs would be roughly equal to the number killed by them

Actually, if the FDA really did this the marginal -- in this case, most-dangerous -- drug approved should kill as many people as it save. But since every drug before that would save more people as it killed, on net there should be more people saved than killed.

[libertarian alert]

I'm not sure the drug example is a safety problems per se, it looks more like an incentive problem to me.

If an FDA official approves a bad drug that kills 1000 people/year, he probably gets canned. If he rejects a good drug that would have saved 1000 lives/year...well, no one including him will actually know how many lives it would have saved, and he will take his paycheck home and sleep soundly at night.

Can you come up with an example that doesn't involve government?

The rationalist viewpoint seems to add a key point that is missing in the acutal article: the motivation why people would say they desire creativity. Signalling, of course.