My tuppence worth

David Thompson has a great post up on attacks against rationality:

Cultural equivalence underlies the current fashion for religious protectionism, whereby reason and scientific methodology are depicted as equivalent to faith and merely a matter of lifestyle choice, as if logical enquiry had no attributes that set it apart from religious ideology and a priori belief. But to equate these very different phenomena requires one to flatten values and empty the mind in the ostensible interest of ‘fairness’ - perhaps to spare the blushes of the less capable among us.

As I see it:

Everyone should be entitled to an opinion.

However, an opinion is only as valid as the arguments used to support it.

The validity of these arguments rests on how rational they are. If, as some do, you challenge the validity of reason then you effectively rule yourself out of the debate - as all you can do without reason is stand on the sidelines and make a lot of unconvincing noise.