Here's some interesting thinking.

Let's see the religiously inspired show the same tolerance toward secularists, non-believers as we do to them. Let them practice what they preach.

In the meantime, as an American, I think people can believe whatever they want so long as it doesn't do harm to others. Unfortunately, religionists have in the majority have done considerable harm and continue to defend those extremists of whatever faith for continuing atrocities.

OK-- bash the "religionists" in the same post where you call for tolerance. The usual result would be a polarized "religionist" reacting to this post by asking how many dead (aborted) babies you counted in your statistics, and the polarized secularists responding "tolerantly" be defending the "right" of abortion instead of understanding the pain they had caused with such an inflammatory post.

Yeah, there's no need to "seek to understand rather than to be understood." Better just to fling unsupported opinion as if "we" all not only "know" all thes same facts but should see them the same way and therefore DO see them the same way.

We ALL want to be "understood," but there's nothing "comfortable" about any of this, is there?

Yeah, why even try to reach greater understanding, or create a climate where it might eventually be possible-- we (human beans) prefer to fight.

I'm convinced.

~Susan