I'd like to suggest another line of thought for you, Alison.  Irrationality isn't the problem.   That's waaaaayyyy too broad a category, and is essentially meaningless in what seems to be your quest.

In your analogy, if Oxygen = Irrationality, then you need another causal agent that precedes oxygen... one that determines how much oxygen is present in any given environment.  As you say, oxygen is pretty much constant on earth, but irrationality in humans is not.  There are lots of things that elicit "irrational" behavior in humans.  Jealousy, love, hate, stress, depression, non-depression, brainwashing, loneliness, etc, etc, etc...

And there are different kinds of irrationality.  It's irrational for most people to have children, but they do, and it's a damn good thing, too, or we'd have a geriatric problem of epic proportions, as the younger generations became incapable of supporting the elderly and infirm.  It's also irrational to believe in God, but if you live in Iran, it's damn rational to act as if  you do, and as we all know, that lie that is repeated enough often becomes true.  It's also irrational to play slot machines in casinos, but millions of people do it, and they find self-actualization through the adrenaline rush they get, and show no signs of being worse for wear.

I offer these examples to illustrate further why your search for a "cause for irrationality" is misled.  The point that I, and Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, et al, are making is NOT that faith based belief is irrational, and therefore bad.  It is that faith based belief is (have we heard this before?) a unique catalyst for exacerbating, amplifying, and/or instigating beliefs and behaviors that are dysfunctional and harmful.  It's not about irrationality.  It's about harm.

So, let me summarize:

*Irrationality, in and of itself, is a broad category that depends largely on perspective.  A single action can be both rational and irrational, regardless of the consequences.

* Many behaviors are quantifiably harmful.  

* Faith based belief systems remove reality checks from people's worldviews, and facilitate decisions made with intuition, emotion, AND irrational reasoning.  Faith literally opposes truth.

* Decisions made without regard to truth are substantially more likely to cause harm.

So... I'm glad you're beginning to see the errors in your thinking.  You've still got a little ways to go.  Maybe we can get you off of this focus on irrationality.  That would be... rational.

I don't think I've written clearly seeing as you guys think I've changed my views, but I haven't.

And I know Harris and Hitchens and even Greta Christina have said "faith is irrational therefore it's harmful". As for you, I don't know anymore, considering you seem keep changing your view. In fact in our last exchange, you explicitly said that what I post doesn't address your point that rational thinking beats irrational thinking. You also said on several occasions that if X person were more rational they wouldn't have done Y. Which kinda sounds like what I was talking about in the OP.

Plus the fact you explicitly said that taking a belief on irrational thinking even if harmless lends credence to other irrational beliefs which may not be harmless.

In your example of the slot machine, the moderate slot machine player can lend credence to the compulsive gambler.

Actually, the temporal lobe is where religion appears to come from.

The theists will now tell us that God and the devil are continually sending EM pulses through our skulls.

Not substantially.  I had one significant change of perspective when I read an article on tolerance of cognitive dissonance.  That changed the way I thought of the consequences of living with cognitive dissonance.  I no longer assert that cognitive dissonance -- in and of itself -- is a stress inducer.

Beyond that, my views are essentially the same (unless I'm forgetting something) as they have always been.  I've refined and improved the way I express them, and thought of several new perspectives from which to present them, but I don't think they've changed much.  I think where you're getting confused is that you conflate my arguments frequently.  For instance, you still seem to think that I believe "Irrationality causes bad things."  That argument is so broad as to be useless.  I believe that a specific kind of irrationality -- basing decisions on faith, particularly when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- is significantly more likely to lead to completely wrong answers to questions of what people should do.  This is pretty basic stuff.  If we have a goal, then our path to that goal will be more accurate if we have true data in our arguments.  If we're trying to get from A to B, and our data is wrong, we're very likely to end up in the wrong place -- to not reach our goal, but rather, some other end.

Why you have such a hard time understanding this simple argument is still a puzzle to me.

I usually stay out of verbal wars, especially between a Canadian and a Southerner, both of you will probably join forces to eradicate me and then go back to your war so to speak.

I look at it this way: Consider a human to be a computer (Paisley inspired). If the computer is programmed with errors in the OS it tends to blue screen and crash. Incorrect operations may result and incorrect answers may be forthcoming.

So as to the analogy, the human bases his decisions on a flawed OS, religious beliefs of any kind for example. When he considers anything he does so with the flawed OS and all of his decisions and processing may be affected. Whether or not the decisions or conclusions reached produce good or bad outcomes is not the issue as either may result. The problem is they are reached with a flawed process and many times for incorrect reasons. In a very similar situation a very different conclusion may occur. This produces instability in the overall system causing very strange outcomes. For example Christians shooting doctors, interfering in the lives of others (didn't Jesus tell his followers to knock the dust off their feet and walk away), justifying wealth accumulation such as several TV Evangelists do taking cash to better their life at the expense of the contributor (against the clear directives of their Jesus), forcing conversions, justifying crusades, killing witches and the like. This has been true since the beginning, Ambrose for one advocated torture if needed to bring about conversion.

When fantasy is substituted for reality in an equation the outcome is likely to be unstable and unpredictable. That's what I see when religious belief is used in decision making. Those doing so don't consider what they are doing to be irrational, and since their basis of understanding is flawed they can't.

So it's not just the belief that is the problem, it's how it's used. Oxygen alone does not cause a fire, nor do combustible materials, a catalyst of some kind is needed, but fires need it to continue. Their are so many ways a fire can occur, I  designed smoke alarms back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth back in the 1970s. So as Alison says, a belief does not cause bad things to occur, in and of itself, they always seem to be present when they happen however just like oxygen and combustible materials. Irrational thinking can and will produce unstable outcomes and results. As Alison says with her analogy of oxygen/fires to irrationality/bad things, there must be more to explain it. Fires can be started with any possible combustible. The catalyst is the cause, lightning, chemical, shorted wiring, the oxygen allows its progression and the combustible is what burns. So the real question is what are the catalysts that cause bad things to occur when irrational beliefs are held. Is this catalyst any different than bad things occurring from other sources. I think they are the same. Humans with flawed operating systems are just as likely to push the big red button over political ideology as over religious fanaticism. American generals during the Cuban missile crisis were ready to go to nuclear war for example though their win would have been a real disaster of a world, they would have done so. Very irrational and very fortunate we slipped past it.

History shows that irrationalities have produced unintended consequences whether it was Hitler, Tojo, George Bush or Pope Innocent II and the 1st Crusade. George Bush allowed irrational thinking to dominate his decision making thus producing years of war all for the wrong reasons with still untold consequences and outcomes. Pope Innocent was a very pious man who was sincere, but his fanning of the issue brought about the death of hundreds of thousands and wasn't even what the Byzantine Emperor had wanted. Instead of a few hundred knights he was confronted by thousands of fortune seekers and supposed religiously inspired pilgrims. And long before they made it there, thousands of Jews were murdered in Europe.

So for example in this case, the pope's message to aid their brother Christians resulted in the unintended murder of thousands. Which is my point, when incorrect data is utilized, unknown unpredictable results will occur.

So what is the catalyst in the case of the mother who kills her baby in Texas. Was it religion? Or was she mentally unbalanced and with an already flawed process used bad data and chopped off her kids arms, or drowned them or whatever to save them from Satan. What would she have done if religion didn't exist? Kill them anyway probably. Perhaps we do jump on the band wagon too soon and exclaim, "see what religious belief does". At the same time however we have calculating schemers that do similar acts for political reasons or because they think they can get away with it. And yes there are many believers who are very sincere and cause no harm, we have little to fear from them perhaps. But on the other hand there are also many militants who would just as soon bring back torture and burn non-believers at the stake if they could. Any ideology can be used in a very bad way as history has shown. Religious belief has the possibility of being misused as does fanatical nationalism and both cause our problems today. What can prevent this sort of thing is rational thinking based in reality not on fantasy and delusion. Though as humans, we will error at times that we are still here and not living in atomic rubble says that we may be learning.

Good points and I generally agree.

This is a strawman and it's basically saying that the house burned down due to a gas leak and then when asked for proof yelling "What, so you don't think gas leaks cause fires?!!!"

What I'm trying to get at when I ask those kind of things isn't "NONE of these are caused by faith-based thinking" it's how much each factor contributed to the dysfunction and in order to do that you have to, by golly, ask about the other factors. You won't touch an actual study on the causes of dysfunction with a 10 foot stick.  In fact don't even bother doing studies.

This merely re-enforces my thinking that you refuse to get into the specifics and you refuse to be willing to be able to distinguish between other causes.

But my house caught on fire because of a gas leak!

What you seem to be missing everytime is humanity's ability to make rational or irrational decisions.  It's like trying to get rid of unwanted pregnancy in America by getting Americians to not having sex. Theoretically it would work, but it ain't happening.

And to burn down a strawman before it's built, I'm not saying don't bother spreading reason/science. I'm saying even scientifically minded people can make irrational decisions and stick to them. [I wonder how many Doctors smoke?]