imagine dawkins is limbaugh and haggard is oprah for six minutes

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Just a thought experiment. No permanent damage. I promise.

Try to drop your conditioning to believe one way or the other on the evolution vs. creation axis, drop your default assumptions and just listen closely to the exchange on this video. If you succeed, you might even come away thinking Haggard made some extremely lucid points....

Almost nobody in history has ever been consciously evil in the Snidely Whiplash sense. We all have what we feel are decent reasons for doing what we do, or what we feel are righteous excuses for it. In this, one's religious ideas and political leanings are immaterial. If you could stand and accuse Hitler of being Hitler he would resist you to his dying breath, might even kill himself, or you, before giving you a chance to prevail in such a thing.

Rarely does anyone just capitulate to aggressive accusations of their ideals or morals or strongly-held beliefs being less than laudable. Usually the mere chance that these might be cast in an unflattering light causes people to feel threatened, and they become preëmptively defensive. If this does not derail the possibility of being made to look wrong, or bad, or stupid, or in some way shameful, they become outright hostile and begin groping around for allies to help obliterate this unhappy turn of intercourse, try to cite historical good guys who exemplify their good qualities, grasp at straws to use as cudgels... and stupidly frequently succeed in this.

No matter how progressive.

No matter how conservative.

No matter how religious.

No matter how scientific.

People modify their nasty behavior when their fellows, people in their circles, begin making it the companionable thing to do. One does not necessarily have to condone or excuse any of it in order to befriend them, help them feel they're going to live through taking their heads out of their asses.

The Dawkins side of the instant polemic is as nefarious as the Haggard side, and neither, clearly, shows the slightest inclination to budge. No. Certainly both wish to escalate. It's as though recognizing their common humanity and wishes for a better world and caucusing from this basis is completely out of the realm of feasibility... something space aliens do in sci-fi novels... or lunatics mutter about in the bin... but not, fates forfend, within a real world "civilization"....

Nope. Never that.