[Vision2020] Are you enabling extremism?

[Andreas Schou]

> So by treating faith as if it was a good ideal, it enables extremists to
> use it for almost any purpose they care to name.  So, are you enabling
> extremism?

In terms of what I actually believe to be objectively true, I'm more
in line with Dawkins than I am, for instance, with Keely. However, in
terms of what I believe to be *correct*, in terms of ethics, I'm far
more in line with Keely than I am with Dawkins.

Dawkins doesn't believe he has to prove that reasonable ethics are
better than unreasonable ethics. That may seem like a flip
observation, but I've seen no indication that it's better to construct
your ethical system based on reasonable, rather than unreasonable
principles. Either way, most people seem to get to roughly the same
answers.

If ethics were a function of reason, rather than some deeper, more
automatic function of the human mind, then one would expect that a
greater capacity for reason would correlate strongly with a greater
capacity for ethical behavior. I haven't ever seen that to be the
case.

-- ACS