Same planet, different worlds

Of course it's good and necessary to work hard to understand the POV of one's opponents. I fully support that. But there's something psychopathic about believing that the Mossad or the CIA engineered 9/11, because you can't bring yourself to admit that Arab Muslims did it. You can't solve the problem until you admit there is a problem. Yesterday the Saudi delegation that came to my newspaper insisted that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, period, the end. Which is, of course, insane. If there were millions of Christians who used Christian scripture to justify commiting violent, murderous acts in the name of serving Christ, then we would have a Christian terrorism problem -- one that would be much harder to solve if Christians insisted, against all available evidence, that it was bigoted to speak of Christianity and terrorism in the same sentence.>

Hi, Steve,

Offhand, if you like him, I would suggest saying "I don't believe that" and then changing the subject away from anything to do with 9/11 or religion. That is a polite way of indicating without actually saying it that you think he is an idiot.

Or you could say, "I can't abide anti-Jewish remarks." Or, "Conspiracy theories are fun, aren't they?">

I remember something a friend of mine told me shortly after the beginning of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. I was a senior in high school then, and my friend was a freshman in college. There was an Iranian student in his dorm, who enthusiastically supported the Khomeini regime. (Odd, I know, since most Iranian expats were supporters of the Shah, or at least opposed to Khomeini.) In any event, the Iranian student said that the Islamic revolution had brought real freedom to Iran, and that there was no freedom in America. The American students could never get the Iranian student to agree that, while he might disagree with some things about America, there was real freedom in America. In relating this to me, my friend commented, "How do you conduct a debate about freedom with someone whose idea of what freedom means is completely different from yours?"

This is probably why Plato spends so much time simply defining terms.>