Blindness: Spiritual blindness worse than physical?

Canadian journalist David Warren comments on blindness and spirituality

The most fascinating thing about actual blindness, is that it confers certain advantages in seeing what is invisible to the eyes. There is, to put this plainly, a spiritual world "behind" this visible one, just as there is a visible world behind the tactile. The blind do not have the visible world to distract them.

The spiritual world is not disputable. To deny it would be like a man born blind, denying colour because he has never personally experienced it, and refuses to take it on someone else's faith. Nor could one prove to that blind man that colour exists. Even if you showed him a rainbow. And yet, there are people born blind who can tell the difference between red and blue, when they touch these colours in the sunlight.

and - as a man who is no friend to violent thugs- Warren is compassionate to the genuine seekers in Islam,

I am not saying there aren't many hard, violent passages in the Koran, and Hadiths; nor am I saying these are no better or worse than similar passages in the New Testament, or Dharmapada. For to say this is to ignore fact. But before we stare, at what may seem alien and frightening, and before we let anger make us blind, we must realize that the sincere Muslim, in his humility, is doing what we are, when we are seeking God. He is in prayer.

Warren has as little use as I do for evolutionary psychology and "Darwinoids", and some of his comments can be found here.