Faramond:
You seem fixated on this idea that they are secret enemies of rationality, when all they are is builders of imprecise internet 'philosophy' games that try to hit everyone.
I won't go so far as to say that building an imprecise internet game that tries to hit everyone is the same as being a secret enemy of rationality, but I will repeat what I said to vison in my post above:
I am deeply allergic to people who use pseudo-professional knowledge to convince the great unwashed masses that they are stupid and/or illogical.
I also despise colleague who put trick questions on multiple choice tests under the pretense of separating the sheep from the goats. I despise trickery that masquerades as professional knowledge wherever it occurs, even on the internet, because I think that most people do start out a test like this having hopes that they will be confirmed lucid if not the reincarnation of Socrates, and the test is most certainly designed to destroy that hope in the average person if it achieves nothing else.
Whether they are secretly motivated I can't really know. Maybe they just get more advertising money when they get lots of hits and lots of emails.
Faramond wrote:Of course, one can argue with their reasoning.
Faramond, they couldn't pass Philosophy 101 with reasoning like that. That's what makes their pronouncements so laughable.
I would not have concluded that they were pushing God from the questions on this test alone; though I would certainly have concluded that they were pushing an idiosyncratic and broadly demeaning view of rationality. My conclusion about a not-so-up-front agenda came from the combination of the answers given on the dead chicken test, which has to do with moral reasoning, and the fact that they are advertised on another website together with book likes the Catholic Encyclopedia and The World According to Chabad, or whatever that other book was, as all cut from the same cloth.
There's nothing wrong with the Catholic Encyclopedia! But it doesn't pretend to be religiously neutral, does it.
I'm not an atheist and I don't care if websites are out to prove a religious point, but I suspect that any attack on the ability of religious people to reason properly would be just as repulsive to established religious authorities as the equating belief in God to belief in evolution would be repulsive to a scientist. Not all religions apply the same system of logic to their orthodoxy, but all religions with any ... provenance, let's say ... do attempt to deduce from religious principle to moral precept using some consistent method. Attempting to convince people that religion is nothing but wayward inner conviction also strikes me disingenuous and a rather dangerous idea to espouse. That was pretty much the point of the morality test and I found it disturbing, not funny at all.
So I don't know what bone they're chewing on, but I am not satisifed that the answer is 'none.' Shoot me, if you like, but the whole picture does not add up for me. Maybe they're just jerks. That too is always a possibility.
Jn