…many believers, on the other hand, love to frequently insult atheists by claiming the opposite…

You should not take it as an insult. If they understand what they are saying it applies to them also. Here are two points they are trying to make, albeit usually poorly:

1. Human nature is not good (especially compared to godly nature). All humans are fundamentally sinful and “not good”.

2. All good is from God. Any good a believer does is not “their” good, it was brought by God. The believer is fundamentally “not good” also. (talk about an ego check ;<)

Yes, I think being intellectually dishonest and cowardly are not immoral, they are akin to self mutilation. Things only become immoral when you harm (or risk harming) innocent others when you should have known better.

Hey, at least we agree on something. Unfortunately we still disagree on who is being intellectually dishonest and cowardly ;> Seriously, those words are nothing but inflamatory and would tend to make one believe that you have no regard for other people.

But as soon as they vote for a candidate based on their religion (or don’t vote for one because of their lack thereof), raise their children with these beliefs, pass their beliefs off to others as fact, etc. then it becomes immoral.

So, if you vote, do you vote on the basis of who you think the best candidate will be? How do you judge that? Your beliefs, imagine that. If you ever raise children are you going to do it with your belief structure?

If you believe passing your beliefs to others as fact is immoral I should assume you don’t do it. That being the case, you would have to be agnostic at best. Because there is no more proof for the non-existence of God than there is proof of his existence.

While I hold that the proposition “At least one god exists” and “It is not the case that at least one god exists” are morally neutral, I do not think that this is true of all beliefs.

In fact, while I have repeatedly made the claim that you quote above, I have also asserted that “epistemic negligence” and “epistemic recklessness” are among the worst moral crimes.

I compare these crimes to the crime of drunk driving. If a person wants to drive drunk on his own 10,000 acre ranch with nobody else around, then he is not doing anything wrong. Wrongness comes into it (moral neutrality is lost) when his recklessness puts others at risk.

Even if the drunk driver makes it home safely, he still puts others at risk, and that shows a lack of regard for the well-being of others that is morally contemptible.

The belief “The gun is not loaded” on the part of a person who points a gun at somebody and pulls the trigger is not morally neutral precisely because it has implications for the well-being of others.

However, the belief “The gun is not loaded” on the part of a person who points it at a safe target on a firing range and pulls the trigger is, in fact, morally neutral. The fact that it is not morally neutral in the first case does not disprove its moral neutrality in the second.

“At least one god exists” is morally neutral because it carries absolutely no implications for how to act. We have to add other propositions to this (e.g., “God wants us to kill all of the homosexuals”) before we actually get any real-world implications. Those additional propositions (or belief in those propositions) are not morally neutral. But belief in the proposition “At least one God exists” is morally neutral.