(the above didn't space properly, and I don't seem to have the edit function to re-edit the post, so I'm just going to post it again here, in a more readable spaced fashion. Hopefully a mod can delete the above post, and make this the OP)

None, of us are truly rational individuals, when we try to portray ourselves as such we are only denying the qualities of being human, we're in self-denial. Our understanding of life is affected by our subjective experience of it. Our biases and our passions have the potential to create, for all of us, elements of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. 

In my experiences with believers and unbelievers this quality doesn't care about one's religious beliefs. In fact a denial of our biases is delusion in itself.

The God Delusion attempts to promote a "rational" scientific worldview, that we should look at the world as scientist supposedly engage the world, as impartial observers, impartial to where the truth may lie, just that we pursue it. 

And he concludes that disbelief can lead us down this path. What Dawkins fails to realize is that, in being humans we have an emotional engagement with the world as well, in that we can never be impartial in our worldview. We have a desire for certain for outcomes, and have a desire for the truth to lie, were we desire it to lie. 

Dawkins own worldview, in analyzing religion is far from impartial, his misanthropy and passionate distaste for it prevent him from being an impartial observer. In fact Dawkins analysis of religion is far from anything that we would remotely call science. He resorts to  anecdotal evidence, and confirmation bias lead him to believe unsupported claims.

One such example of this in the God Delusion is Dawkin's deceptive use of study in the journal Nature:

Notice the study claims that the majority of these Scientist do not believe in a personal God, not that they are atheist. The last I checked atheism is a disbelief in all God, not only a personal one.  There are number of believers in God, that don't believe that he is a personal one, such as Spinoza, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the multitude of deist, and etc.., that are far from atheist. Dawkins use of this study to support a "preponderance of atheists" is just plane false. Dawkins doesn't even realize the naivety in this assumption. 

So claiming that most scientist are atheist, by this particularly study is irrational as it comes. 

I don't believe that Dawkins intentionally desired to deceive his readers, but that his desire for one outcome to be true, created a delusion, a self-deception in how he read this study, to allow him to create that leap in logic from a disbelief in a personal god, to a disbelief in all Gods all together (atheism).

Many unbelievers have quite passionate dislike towards "religion", and to claim that you are truly rational, and are capable of being impartial in your analysis of religion, is a delusion in itself, because you deny you emotional desire for a particular outcome to be true. You deny your personal bias. Our emotional engagement with religion, doesn't allow us to be impartial.

Another example of this sort of delusion in the Atheist community, is among Jesus mythicist. In a discussion I've been having over at the with the self proclaimed Ancient text expert and Historian, Rook Hawkins. He claims that "every critical scholar admits"  that "Mark used Homer as model" (http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/14930#comment-186759). 

He didn't even say some critical scholars, but all. I have asked him to provide evidence in support of this extravagant claim, but he hasn't done so yet.

Hawkins claims that "Jesus is Odysseus", a conclusion that he came to from reading Dennis R. MacDonald's book The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark.

He suggested that I pay the $20 bucks to go buy the book, rather than providing me actual claims from it. But I did find a website for MacDonald's ideas: http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/Odysseus_and_Jesus_Visit_Hades.html

You want to hear one remarkable similarity, that lead to supposedly "all critical scholars" to the conclusion that Jesus is Odysseus? Here's one:

“Hero and men eat supper, including wine”. The point of reference in the two narratives: from the Odyssey’s: "[W]e feasted our fill on meat and wine", and from Mark 14: “[T]hey were ...eating [also drinking "the fruit of the vine"]”. You mean to tell me, both Jesus and Odysseus ate food? Oh poop that means, those French dudes who drink wine with their Lamb Chops are Odysseus as well! 

And to top it all off in Mark 14, the verses used in this comparison, says it’s the day of the Jewish Passover. Every Jew in living in first century Jerusalem is eating a supper that includes wine, and meat. 

(you can find me going over more of these supposed similarities in this thread: (http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/14997#comment-187747)

I mean what hooey?

But yet you find such a passionate support for these sort of erroneous conclusions. As I pointed out with Dawkins, I don't believe that this was intentional deception by Hawkins, but that his own passionate engagement with the subject, doesn't allow him to be impartial, but deludes him, with confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance. He had an emphatic support for MacDonald, but an impartial anaylsis of MacDonald clearly reveals the hooey of his thesis, that's not even hard to notice, as the above example shows.

These sort of "delusions" are rampant among believers, and unbelievers. We are not impartial observers of the world, but since we are part of the world we live in, we are passionate observers of it as well. Our dislikes, especially our passionate opposition, creates biases and delusions. If we are liberal such delusions emerge when we are examining the conservative viewpoint, and vice versa, particularly when have  passionate distaste for the other side. 

In the same vein the religious mind has difficulty comprehending the non-religious mind, as the non-religious have in examining the religious mind, especially when we have a passionate distaste towards belief, or non-belief. 

Our passions create a dilemma for us, in that they desire a particular outcome to be true, so that we are not impartial to where the truth may lie. From here cognitive dissonance sets in, and we fawn over anything that supports where we desire the truth to lie, and become overtly skeptical, and many times in denial of that which is contrary to what we desire to be true.

There is no such thing as a truly rational individual, as humans our engagement with the world is passionate, and we can never be as impartial as we desire to be. 

Let's not delude ourselves into thinking otherwise. We all have our biases, and a grounding for potential self-deceptions. 

 I think the OP has confused 'truly rational' with 'fully(or solely) rational'

A person can be truly rational and still have room to be emotional.

I was about to say the same exact thing.  I'm unaware of anyone that is "ALWAYS Rational."  I'm certainly not.  The O.P. seems to have fallen in one of my traps.  We may have inferred that we were always rational but we never said it (not to my knowledge at least), we let you make that conclusion (irrationally).

Use me instead, I know those two guys well.  They're both much more book smart than I am, and I'm more rational than both of them. 

Um... yeah... well... ummm...

Hmm...

Do you ever find that an argument is so odd and disjointed that you don't even know how to start addressing it?  Anyway, this is really, really simple.  Logic and empirical probability are the measures of rationality.  If an argument is logically valid, and the premises are most likely true based on empirical testing, then the conclusion that follows is rational.

If a person most often makes rational decisions, or alternatively, makes rational decisions on most of the things that are generally agreed upon as really damn important, we say they're a rational person.

If a person frequently makes irrational decisions, or screws up really big decisions, we say they are irrational.

A given conclusion can be examined without the bias of the individual simply by reducing it to either symbolic logic or syllogism.

Duh.

Ah, if only it was so easy to remove ourselves from our biases.

Do you believe your analysis of religion is impartial and objective. Do you accept that your view on it is drenched in your passionate distaste for all things religious, there by creating biases and self-deceptions in your view on it? Or would you say that when you express your thoughts on religion, you examine it without your biases intact?

Would you say that your understanding of religion is informed by a scientific analysis of it? Is your belief in what religion can and cannot do based on this? Do you believe that an impartial observers of religion would agree with your view, or if your views are more less to be taken by faith? 

I thought about doing this for Sapient since he requested that it be done for him, rather than me using Hawkins, and Dawkins as an example of atheist self-deception, but I prefer to use you, particularly when you have an interesting blog post, that address one of the most common forms of self-deception among crusading atheist: http://hambydammit.livejournal.com/15158.html#cutid1.

I hope you don't take this an attack on you in me targeting your blog post, and that's why I'm kindly asking for you permission in doing so before i proceed. So what say you? 

There is nothing bias about that statement of disbelief in itself. I think it's quite reasonable for individuals to not believe in God. In fact I was an unbeliever for much of my adult life. But than again, I was never dogmatic about it either, or passionate about my disbelief. I was never compelled to crusade my disbelief. I never saw atheism as the savior of humanity, nor did i believe in the magical fairy dust of disbelief. I was never compelled to believe that disbelief, would lead me magically to care for humanity more by perceiving life as short, particularly since I've lived my life around individuals for whom the brevity of life became a reason for indifference. I didn't treat my atheism as a sort of religion, a cure for the woes of humanity. 

Biases and self-deception forms from our passion. When we are passionate about our disbelief, self-deception and bias is likely to be there as well. 

Atheism is being passionate about nothing??? I don't follow.

Atheism means one thing: Not believing in a god or gods. How can one be passionate about DISbelief?

Well, if it is in opposition to belief, it's easy enough to be passionate about disbelief.  For instance,  if anyone tried to pass a bill in Congress mandating daily molar sacrifices to the Tooth Fairy,  not believing in the Tooth Fairy would be very important to everyone wishing to keep their teeth.  I'd say passionately opposing belief would be a good thing.

It's probably just a semantic game to say whether it's actually passionate disbelief or passionate opposition to belief.  But anyway, there's plenty of good reasons for atheists to be passionate about the cosmos being godless.  After all, "Godless" is a quality, when surrounded by a universe of discourse, and is actually a positive statement.  Consider:  If two people are having drinks, and things are going real well, and one says to the other, "I don't have any STDs," and the other says, "Awesome!  I don't have any STDs either," then the nonexistence of something is quite a good thing.

   Dear Mr.Theidiot you have proven beyond any doubt in my mind that you have named yourself with the utmost accuracy.

Excellent points.

For me, rationality is the practice of framing my thoughts and ideas in context of that which we know about the universe. "That which we know of the universe" is the ontology generated by the practice of the scientific method. That restricts our rational worldview in two ways:

1) We are limited to that which is accessible to the scientific method.

You cannot rationally approach anything which cannot be observed and quantified. Also, all new knowledge must build upon the old. Without a framework, all you have is dry measurements. As an example, take a look at quantum mechanics. We have very little framework with which to build on QM, and so the underlying principles of QM still escape us. We have descriptions of behavior, but no explanation for much of that behavior. We are having a grand old time trying to fit it into the framework of our old ontology, to make everything from gravity to relativity to QM fit together in a neat package.

2) Our understanding of the universe is incomplete, and so may change at any time, given new data and new theories based on the new data.

This is really just a corrollary to #1. If we admit we don't know everything about the universe, we have to admit that our understanding may (and probably will) change as we learn more. In the QM example, once we figure out how gravity, relativity, and QM play together, our understanding of the universe may change dramatically.

This doesn't negate Newton or Einstein or any of our current knowledge. It's more like purchasing a big house, and you put all your furniture in the living room and bedrooms, and you live for a while. then you open up the big doors (which you thought were just wood panels until you noticed the doorknobs) at the back of the house, and you discover that what you thought was the living room was really just the foyer, and your bedrooms were really broom closets. The discovery of the new rooms doesn't change the facts of the foyer, or what you considered your bedrooms; but it does change how you view them.

With all that, rationalism is the use of the knowledge you currently hold. As different people hold different subsets of our shared ontology, their ability to talk rationally on a subject varies with their own expertise. Also, some parts of the ontology may have multiple interpretations, such as our current knowledge of QM. In those cases, our ability to discuss QM rationally depends on our ability to recognize our ignorance, by saying that string theory may be a potential explanation.

This approach to rationality is orthogonal to the feelings you experience.

Leo Kottke is a better guitar player than Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was the better artist, though. He could induce feelings with his music in ways that Kottke can never hope to duplicate. This has nothing to do with rationality. Art is about the expression and communication of complex emotions through sensory stimuli (is that redundant?).

You can separate the rational from the non-rational. We as humans cannot disable the non-rational part of us (the emotional part), though that part is suppressed to varying degrees in some people. Nor would I wish to shut down my emotions -- I enjoy feeling good about life, and even sometimes feeling sad or angry.

The trick to rationality is to recognize when you are truly being rational (basing your thoughts on that which we know) rather than basing it on which you wish to be true. We sometimes think we know something without really knowing it. This is especially true in things like politics and economy, where good objective knowledge is hard to come by, and the motive for clouding the truth with misinformation leads to a lot of false knowledge.

Is there an objective rationality? I believe so. It's predicated on my belief that the universe holds an objective reality.

Anyway, that's my view of what rationality is all about. Others may have different views or approaches.

Theidiot,

  You have hit the nail on the head.  Atheists do fail to see their own bias and prejudices when dealing with religion.  One delusion that atheist believe is that higher education will get rid of religion.  This belief is false.  One day atheist will realize that religion is here to stay.   You have done well thank you for this post.