Yet as his "therefore" indicates, Chaplin thinks that accepting all (or at least a great many) beliefs have epistemic warrant is what allows us to "proceed in debate on the basis of an attitude of mutual intellectual respect for each other's convictions". Not for me it isn't. I proceed with respect because I recognise that intelligent people can believe wrong things, sometimes even stupid things. And so I respect their intelligence, not the cogency of their beliefs. It's a variant of hate the sin, love the sinner. As Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse put it in their admirably lucidReasonable Atheism: "We do not 'respect' religious beliefs. We do, however, respect religious believers."
At the same time, by the way, I also keep channels of communication open out of disrespect to my own intelligence. When you look out into the world and see that it's insane, you have to accept the likelihood that you probably have your little pockets of insanity too.
---SPSmith
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