Ezra wonders why one religion can be considered more worthy of belief than another, using Christianity and the Flying Spaghetti Monster as examples:

The flying spaghetti monster and what-have-you are clearly not belief systems with the demonstrated resiliency or applicability of Christianity, but my crude understanding of the way faith works in all this doesn't provide much illumination as to why [Christianity and other mainstream religions] are more worthy of faith, as opposed to a sort of for-the-good-of-society adherence.

But the answer is pretty simple, isn't it? The Flying Spaghetti Monster is designed to be an enormous "fuck you" to people of faith. It's pretty funny, but an idea grounded in that sort of aggressively negative impulse is obviously unworthy of genuine respect.

Other religions were designed for more genuine reasons, and those reasons matter to people. The extent to which a belief system appears to be genuinely concerned in helping its followers — that's important. I think this can be hard for devout atheists to see, because they tend to believe that all organized religions amount to systems of enslavement and oppression (whether or not they were intentionally designed to be) — religions' practical badness may vary, but they're all theoretically distasteful in the same way. I think that's a perfectly coherent way of looking at things, but it does assume that the observer is less naive than a large chunk of the earth's population. That's not necessarily an untenable position to be in — but while you're there, you should do your best to not be an ass about it. That means no ironic religions, Darwin fish or zealous anti-evangelism evangelism.

Reducing all religions to one undifferentiated mass of irrationality is a bit hubristic. I think it's not unreasonable to say that if a tradition has meant a lot to a lot of people and isn't a completely transparent scam (e.g. Scientology), then it deserves to be accorded more deference than religious thought-experiments like the FSM. It's just a matter of showing respect for your fellow human beings, some of whom probably even deserve it. A tiny sliver of benefit-of-the-doubt isn't too much to ask.