Taramere Posted March 10, 2010 Posted March 10, 2010 The real debate should be based on why people stick to their opinions even under a mountain of logic, facts and truths. Why is blind faith so powerful? Often each side of a debate is supported by a mountain of logic and facts. It's just that when a person is entrenched in a particular position, they'll dismiss without serious consideration, or simply ignore, any logic and facts presented by the other side. Until they start to look like a child that hums a familiar nursery rhyme over and over again to comfort itself. It takes a fair amount of self awareness and confidence for people to own their behavioural flaws, rather than simply focusing on other people's. For example, say someone were to start a thread on hypocrisy or lying, and admitted to sometimes being guilty of it themselves. Probably quite a few people would something like "Me too. I try to avoid hypocrisy, but I'll slip into it at times. I try not to lie, but there are times I'll lie to get myself out of a tricky situation." Then other people will come in and chastise them for it. Taking the opportunity to talk about how much they hate liars and hypocrites. But I think if people are really honest with themselves, they'll always be able to recall situations in which they lied or adopted a stance which was quite hypocritical. That's one example of a situation in which things are almost guaranteed to get heated. Not necessarily anything to do with gender...though in some cases it might be (eg if you have a poster talking about how hypocritical/dishonest the opposite sex is). It's always easier, and more fun, to focus on other people's flaws than to look inwards and attempt to improve oneself. In the same way that it's so much easier to give advice than it is to follow it. Perhaps LS enables a lot of us to spend a bit too much time indulging ourselves in both of these easy activities - rather than tackling some of the changes we need to make in ourselves..
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