Today's post, Free to Optimize was originally published on 02 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It may be better to create a world that operates by better rules, that you can understand, so that you can optimize your own future, than to create a world that includes some sort of deity that can be prayed to. The human reluctance to have their future controlled by an outside source is a nontrivial part of morality.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A New Day, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.