y va marquer wrote:
In a general sense I reckon one of the major problems in any discussion on topics such as religion is that people identify with (or are identified as) either right or left.
They cease to question what's prescribed for them to think, they don't listen in good faith to opinions that don't toe the hard line - ultimately exchanges descend into conflict.
Understand what you're saying Y, but in most cases there is no "balanced centre" to go along with two opposed opinions when they are based on premises that disagree.
Historically it has not been the case that both sides of any given political argument have ceased to question prescribed thought.
More often one side is stubborn and reactionary while the other is mostly correct, even radically correct. Take women's suffrage or the question of mitigating climate change as your examples if you like—we can look back to the former as a triumph and forward to the latter as a catastrophe.
On this forum we often hear the claim the post-WWII social democratic welfare state is economically incompatible with large scale culturally heterogeneous migration. In a global economy where the movement of exploited labour is restricted, this is an attenuated contemporary echo of the refrain of a plantation owner asking who will pick the cotton if we end slavery.
