As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
What’s different about religion is that people don’t feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone’s an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there’s no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there’s no back pressure on people’s opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
But this isn’t true. There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost. But the more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones.
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.
[…] If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. [2]
Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
Actually the root of the problem is fanaticism. Religion and politics are huge topics in our culture. People tend to be fanatical. Chances are that you find more religion and politics fans than Javascript fans.
Certainly, everyone has an opinion on religion and politics but there’s a minority who doesn’t necessarily start a war every time those topics emerge. Why? Because they’re not fanatics. They believe and have convictions but don’t need to flame or defense anything.
On the other hand, sometimes you can see that there’s one or two who divert the conversation even if the topic is something different, defending their cause blindly, even if they’re not experts. They’re fanatics.
So, you can have identity and like a lot of stuff, because we are human and subjective, but you have to have it clear and know that there’s no need to be a fanatic. You can even use the word as in: “I’m a big fan of PHP”, just like an atheist can say “oh my god” to express surprise, but nothing more.
