[zzo38computer]

> Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".

I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.

[Jensson]

A person might believe and be rational, but it seems like believing makes being rational harder, so you have less rational people among believers.

Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.

[zzo38computer]

> Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer.

Yes, but being religious does not automatically mean that you have to shut down any discussion with "god will this" (although some religious people are, not all religious people are).

There are less rational people among both religious and nonreligious. (Although, the nonreligious will not say "God willed this", that does not necessarily mean that they will not say a different answer that is just as worthless as the religious answer.)

[Jensson]

You don't think that having an entire community to support your irrational arguments makes a difference to your level of irrationality?

The problem is that their religious peers would take their side, find "good willed this" to be a more reasonable argument than the facts, and thus they as a group wont accept the truth. Without organized irrationality they wouldn't create a support group of irrational peers to back up their irrational arguments so in most cases they would have to adapt. And such irrational support groups doesn't often materialize randomly, religion absolutely helps them. There are a few of those who aren't religious, but I condemn the irreligious ones just as much, Homeopathy is just nonsense etc.

So for me the rest doesn't matter, if an organization is first and foremost organized irrationality I'll argue that the organization is bad. Maybe you don't use it that way, but others do, and that hurts everyone.