A friend recently asked how strongly I believe that my deconversion from Christianity was not a mistake. Here's my response, and for those of you who are not Christians, I'm just wondering what numbers you would give:

"There is a part of me that wants to say the chance is far less than 1 percent. But when I consider what 1% must mean about my ability to follow complex arguments and base my judgement on the right premises, it seems absurd to say that.

Trying to honestly estimate the chance that I'm wrong about the Bible being generally reliable is a fascinating exercise... I know the number is low, but I'm not sure how low.  

Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20. After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.

Wow, 5%!?! If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell", I feel scared. But I know how to cheer myself up: I just say, "No way, the chance I'll end up in hell MUST be less than 5%. After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and... [rehearse all the atheistic arguments here]".

This back-and-forth from certainty to uncertainty makes me feel like I'm doing something seriously wrong.

So what about you? What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?"

Numbers please.

http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2011/10/john-harris-on-chemical-enhancement.html

I created this word cloud based on http://lesswrong.com/promoted/.rss.

The words "Rational" and "Rationality" might trigger negative stereotypes for some people, but this image is positive and inspiring. I'm glad to see we are promoting top level posts on these issues and thought you would be too.

I can drive and listen, but I can't drive and read!  The same is true for most kinds of exercise.

If you are in my situation - wanting to read the sequences without having enough time - feel free to download these audio files for your smart phone or MP3 player.

My vision is to build a podcast feed or downloadable MP3 repository of all the major sequences.  The files I have now are not organized enough to scale out to hundreds of posts, and some of the artifacts of text-to-speech could be reduced with the right pre-processing.  Before I spend more time on this, I want the right tools and process in place. 

Any ideas on how to to proceed?  Would you like to help?  How should I publish these files?

Background

I was raised in the Churches of Christ and my family is all very serious about Christianity. About 3 years ago, I started to ask some hard questions, and the answers from other Christians were very unsatisfying. I used to believe that the Bible was, you know, inspired by a loving God, but its endorsement of genocide, the abuse of slaves, and the mistreatment of women and children really started to bother me.

I set out to study these issues as much as I could. I stayed up past midnight for weeks reading what Christians have to say, and this process triggered a real crisis of faith. What started out as a search for answers on Biblical genocide led me to places like commonsenseatheism.com. I learned that the Bible has serious credibility problems on lots of issues that no one ever told me about. Wow.

My Question

Now I'm pretty sure that the God of the Bible is man-made and Jesus of Nazareth was probably a failed prophet, but I don't have good reasons to reject the supernatural all together. I'm working through the sequences, but this process is slow. I will probably struggle with this question for months, maybe longer.

Excluding the Supernatural was interesting, but it left me wanting a more thorough explanation. Where do you think I should go from here? Should I just continue reading the sequences, and re-read them until the ideas gel? I'm coming from 30 years of Sunday School level thinking. It's not like I grew up with words like "epistemology" and "epiphenomenalism". If there is no supernatural, and I can be confident about that, I will need to re-evaluate a lot of things. My worldview is up for grabs.