Debate: helpful or not?
Do debates bring people together, or entrench differences?
There’s nothing like a good debate to clarify positions. The wits are sharpened, the arguments refined and defined, and we finish with a clearer idea of where we stand. This is democracy’s gift to us. Or is it? In one of her many thoughtful explorations of religions, Karen Armstrong looks at how fundamentalism starts. In The Bible – the Biography, she says it rarely begins as a battle with an external foe, more as an internal struggle in which ‘traditionalists fight their co-religionists’.
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