The Earth stands on the brink of its sixth mass extinction and the fault is ours

[Glenzig]

Originally Posted by paulgiamatti [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't think so. I mean, I still contend that it's a question of morality and not intelligence. For example, I don't think Luminari is a hopeless idiot who probably can't outwit a fruit fly because he's religious. I think he's that stupid in the first place; he'd still be just as mind-numbingly, earth-shatteringly deficient in mental faculty if he happened to be an atheist and not a believer.

The fact that he's a Judeo-Christian doesn't make him more of an idiot, it just makes him an immoral idiot. So I suppose you could say that that's a mental defect of a kind, but I get the feeling you were referring to intelligence or intellectual capacity, and there I tend to disagree. The question of belief really needs to be approached from a moralistic angle, without arrogance, and without assuming the intellectual highground. Not only because you're never going to change any minds by broaching a conversation with, "You're a complete idiot, I'm so much smarter than you!" but also because it's just simply not a measure of intelligence.

The corollary argument would be that because it's not a gauge for intelligence, it certainly is for morality or immorality. In this way I think you can get an accurate reading of someone's moral fiber; the deist would have to, in some way, be more moral than the theist, the zealot more immoral than the disciple, and so forth. But that's not to say you can never have an immoral atheist, or a moral theist - there are countless examples of both, but if you give religion to the immoral atheist, or remove it from the moral theist, you'd see that fiber either grow or shrivel in exactly the expected ways.

Straight out of the Harris handbook. I think it's funny that people who insist that the uinverse has no purpose base the bulk of their argument on morality like Harris does.