You know, there are facts, and there are opinions. I certainly agree about being polite when you have a different opinion. Chacun à son goût!
But facts are only one-way. You can’t have “different” facts, no matter how many times you have heard them or how much you believe them. They will always be nonsense. And education consists of pointing that out. And not being tired of pointing it out, over and over again. Ask any primary-school teacher. But it’s a public service.
Sure, I get embarrassed when someone points out I’m talking nonsense. And that sometimes annoys me. But I try to suck it up. And I try to point out errors in other people’s preaching.
@Archimago used a quote from Thomas Paine on Saturday:
It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error. But nature has not given to everyone a talent for the purpose; and among those to whom such a talent is given, there is often a want of disposition or of courage to do it.
This is from Paine’s Essay on Dream, and in it he goes on to explain why this is important:
The prejudice of unfounded belief, often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy.
Sound like any audiophile mythologies we’ve ever heard of?
Paine continues:
When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others. It is from the influence of this vice, hypocrisy, that we see so many church-and-meeting-going professors and pretenders to religion so full of trick and deceit in their dealings, and so loose in the performance of their engagements that they are not to be trusted further than the laws of the country will bind them. Morality has no hold on their minds, no restraint on their actions.