> Go back and reread yourself in this thread.

I know perfectly well what I said in this thread and don't need to re-read it. It wasn't long.

> You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"???

No, that isn't at all what I said.

First off, it makes no sense for the other party to characterize my "defense of rationalism" in any manner, because I was not offering such a thing. When I say that something doesn't exist, that isn't defending the thing. The thing cannot be "defended" if it doesn't exist in the first place!

Second, I very clearly did not deny any "material similarity". I said that any such material similarity does not matter.

Third, the truth of Bayes' theorem is not why I am correct, and that's also clearly not what I asserted. Rather, Bayes' theorem is an example of what I am correct about.

There is no non-sequitur there; you misrepresent the argument completely. I did not construct a strawman; I merely gave an example of what "rational beliefs" (which are, again, not articles of faith) entail. The point is that, by the same reasoning, you could equally well make out the hard sciences in general to be "cults". If you think you can look at a title for a work like "The Sequences" and instantly map that to "ooh, scary religious canon!", why does the same not apply to, say, Euclid's Elements?

The only strawmanning here is on your part.

I have no idea what strange or harmful articles of faith other people ITT seem to have in mind. Someone mentioned Roko's Basilisk, and as far as I can tell this is the closest the thread got; but that frankly doesn't qualify, either. It's just a proposed consequence of a particular decision theory, and most of the people who care about that decision theory seem to think it's fallacious. (Whether they can propose a fallacy within that theory, or think that this is a proof-by-contradiction refutation of the theory, I don't really know. Personally I think the latter is far more likely.) If it were actually an article of faith, you would see the equivalent of street preachers using it to solicit donations to MIRI. As far as I've been shown, that doesn't actually happen.

But since I haven't been given any better examples than that, I can't argue against them. No, "the Zizians exist(ed)" doesn't count here, first off because nobody's identified any articles of faith they held; second because nobody's drawn any connection between those and any actual principles of rationality.