I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on Kurige, but I think you have to expect a certain amount of questioning if you show up on Less Wrong and say:

One thing I've come to realize that helps to explain the disparity I feel when I talk with most other Christians is the fact that somewhere along the way my world-view took a major shift away from blind faith and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Orwellian double-think.

I realize that my views do not agree with the large majority of those who frequent LW and OB - but I'd just like to take a moment to recognize that it's a testament to this community that:

A) There have been very few purely emotional or irrational responses.

B) Of those that fall into (A) all have been heavily voted down.

In the normal hotel, I would shrug off any unusual noises. In the old haunted mansion, I would run out screaming. The difference between them can best be explained by the mansion's ghostly associations.

Sure, because there are other people around in the hotel. You probably would feel the same if you spent the night in the haunted mansion if it's full of people. Now take that hotel, put it in a remote location and without anybody except yourself. Scary, right?

Going alone into a dark forest at night is scary, going with a group of people can be quite fun.

If you're reading this, Kurige, you should very quickly say the above out loud, so you can notice that it seems at least slightly harder to swallow - notice the subjective difference - before you go to the trouble of rerationalizing.

There seems to be some confusion here concerning authority. I have the authority to say "I like the color green." It would not make sense for me to say "I believe I like the color green" because I have first-hand knowledge concerning my own likes and dislikes and I'm sufficiently confident in my own mental capacities to determine whether or not I'm deceiving myself concerning so simple a matter as my favorite color.

I do not have the authority to say, "Jane likes the color green." I may know Jane quite well, and the probability of my statement being accurate may be quite high, but my saying it is so does not make it so.

I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existance of God.

Critical realism shows us that the world and our perception of the world are two different things. Ideally any rational thinker should have a close correlation between their perception of the world and reality, but outside of first-hand knowledge they are never equivalent.

You are correct - it is harder for me to say "God exists" than it is for me to say "I believe God exists" for the same reason it is harder for a scientist to say "the higgs-boson exists" than it is to say "according to our model, the higgs-boson should exist."

The scientist has evidence that such a particle exists, and may strongly believe in it's existence, but he does not have the authority to say definitively that it exists. It may exists, or not exist, independent of any such belief.

The reason why saying "There is a God and He instilled..." is harder than saying "I believe that there is a God and He instilled..." is because the words "I believe that" are weasel words. The literal meaning of "I believe that" is irrelevant; any other weasel words would have the same effect. Consider the same sentence, but replace "I believe that" with "It is likely that", or "Evidence indicates that", or any similar phrase, and it's just as easy.

Just because people are aware of a concept, and have words which ought to refer to that concept, does not mean that they consistently connect the two. The best example of this comes from the way people refer to things as [good] and [bad]. When people dislike something, but don't know why, they generate exemplars of the concept "bad", and call it evil, ugly, or stupid. This same mechanism lead to the widespread use of "gay" as a synonym for "bad", and to racial slurs directed at anonymous online rivals who are probably the wrong race for the slur. I think that confidence markers are subject to the same linguistic phenomenon.

People think with sentences like "That's a [good] car" or "[Weasel] God exists". The linguistic parts of their mind expand them to "That's a sweet car" and "I believe God exists" when speaking, and performs the inverse operation when listening. They don't think about how the car tastes, and they don't think about beliefs, even though literal interpretation of what they say would indicate that they do.

I was once told that half of Nobel laureates were the students of other Nobel laureates. ... Even after discounting for cherry-picking of students and political pull, this suggests to me that you can learn things by apprenticeship - close supervision, free-form discussion, ongoing error correction over a long period of time - that no Nobel laureate has yet succeeding in putting into any of their many books.

What is it that the students of Nobel laureates learn, but can't put into words?

You can't put mentornship in a book. When I face a problem that may or may not have a solution I find it useful to convince myself that there is a solution, and that I only need to find a path to it. Once I eliminate the doubt or fear that I might be wasting time I'm able to concentrate on the problem at hand. If you define "success" as a problem that may or may not have a solution (ie. you may or may not be able to achieve it) then studying under a super-star may give you a psychological edge over others in the same field. It's a form of tacit permission by which you subconsciously feel entitled to success and may be more likely to take gainful risks or less likely to simply give up.

In other words, be aware that popularity breeds popularity.

This I can understand.

I am a protestant Christian and your friend's experience with "belief" are similar to mine. Or seem to be, from what I gather in your post.

One thing I've come to realize that helps to explain the disparity I feel when I talk with most other Christians is the fact that somewhere along the way my world-view took a major shift away from blind faith and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Orwellian double-think.

The double-think comes into play when you're faced with non-axiomatic concepts such as morality. I believe that there is a God - and that He has instilled a sense of right and wrong in us by which we are able to evaluate the world around us. I also believe a sense of morality has been evolutionarily programmed into us - a sense of morality that is most likely a result of the formation of meta-political coalitions in Bonobo communities a very, very long time ago.

These two beliefs are not contradictory, but the complexity lies in reconciling the two. This post is not about the details of my Escher-esque brain, so suffice to say there are questions unanswered by viewing only the scientific side and there are just as many unanswered if viewed only from the spiritual side.

Simply because your friend is not blind to contradictions in the Orthodox Jewish belief system does not mean she does not sincerely believe - or that she's deceived herself into believing that she believes. It means that she, as all intelligent believers who practice crisis of faith should, understands just how much she doesn't understand.