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Humanism is functionally a religion, and this is functionally a religious belief. That does not invalidate it; far from it. But I think it's better to recognize what are statements of faith as such.
People have a hard time separating "moral worth" from... not exactly "economic worth," but something like that, that complicates their analysis of "equal in humanity" and "equal in literally everything that has value in modern society." I think liberal-progressives are especially bad at separating those and that's why they overcompensate so hard.
Your boyfriend, RIP, sounds like a lovely person, and as a carrier of the spark of humanity, the Imago Dei if you don't mind the religious terminology, has the same moral worth as anyone else. Trying to make him, say, a Cambridge professor or an astrophysicist would not have served anyone well.
But what does one do with that, at the population level? How does a multiethnic, multicultural society wrestle with "some groups are going to be overrepresented in some things, and underrepresented in others," and the downstream effects thereof? I don't know. I don't know of a good answer there, I just know the "hundreds of bonus points for college admissions and hiring decisions" answer is a bad one.
I would disagree with this last one, that cleverness meaning a tendency to manipulate is at its lowest in the modern West. Or was in the Golden Age/Cold War period, and ticked up substantially post-2000ish. Corruption and fraud are much higher basically everywhere else.
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