And it is out of that inaccessible tower

I recently read a post. You can read it too, hyperlink style.

The reason I read it because someone brought it to my attention. And they did it using this quote: "Most argument[s] aren’t rational, they’re just clashes of opposing power centers."

Which is a lot more true than it should be.

The author describes the current ragefest that religious people and atheists are mutually engaged in. How the one side calls the other ignorant, irrational and a whole host of other things. How the discussions between them really ever only touches the surface, and the two sides are mutually refusing to address the real issues.

The title, "Terrain Pt II", makes me think of a plain where there are two towers. Two towers whose inhabitants are fervently at work building up ever better and better cannons to fire at each other, and are so busy with this that they miss two things: the point and each other.

Because, you see, the two towers lie too far from each other to be within cannon shot. And, thus, all the cannony buildup only leads to a lot of wasted effort and a lot of wasted rhetorical prowess.

I find that this is true for many a conflict in our present. Left vs right, conservative vs progressive, PC vs Mac, hammer vs screwdriver - there's a lot of towerbuilding and mutual cannoneering going on that really won't do more than making sure that the sellers of gunpowder stay in business for yet another year.

And they always use the same cannons, too. It's always the good, the true and the beautiful on the own side, and the bad, false and ugly on the other. In some cases, you can just switch the names around and get cheers from both sides; in other cases, you have to be a tad bit more subtle about it. But the general principle is the same: apply the god terms, add fire, back away and watch the fireworks.

This is, more or less, always a waste of time, space and gunpowder. Sure, you can get into it and get some fine-tuning of your atrophied "your mom" muscles, but let's face it: they're atrophied because you don't like to use them and have found a way to live your life without them.

Or have you?

This I ponder myself. It would be a shame to find myself locked in a tower of my own making, to be sure. -