Thought for the day

Subject: Thought for the day.

One of the, can I say problems, that people, for many reasons have such diverse views which no matter how deeply or how long the views, often so diametrically opposed, are maintained and they continue to be the bedrock of who we are.  Is there, there for any  purpose in bringing people together to converse and attempt reconciliation.
Statistics are thrown around like confetti and like confetti have little or no substance because the statistic used is often isolated from the causes of the statistic.
The subjects ranging from "feminism" to "conditions in prison" and "the part religion plays in politics" are aired, opinions voiced, reasons offered and yet little or no change is evinced and the landscape remains much the same.
If on the other hand every time we settle into a discussion we paid attention to what is being said, even if what is being said is completely against ones own views, the act of trying to understand where the others view point has its roots gives, even an unpalatable opinion, perspective.  Perspective can bring to mind the similarities between us and the differences in our mental assumptions, which are often based on common circumstances, can then be better appreciated.
Listening to debates one is often struck by the infallibility of a persons viewpoint only to be struck the next minute by the contrary view which follows it.
On feminism, the arguments, often voiced, as they were today by 'women' who had opposing views were sadly tinged with the acid of contempt for anyone who dared to think otherwise. "The cause" had swallowed any sense of rationality, the demons were men and the power of the system, which to their minds rested with men and these demons were to be sort out, root and branch until equality was seen to be evident even if the price paid was a heavy one on individual women themselves.
There is no greater force than a woman slighted, she has ineffable determination to see herself as the victim when in fact she is as much the cause of disequilibrium as a man. The imperative that carries her forward is not the varying  workplace agenda between men and women which should give her cause for pause to ask herself, does she really want the hell hole of long hours, subservience to someone else's regime, working in conditions that are evil when she can get some poor slob to do this work for her, or is it only the heights she desires and the assistance of gender preference through women only lists.
Conditions in prison were to visit the problem as if the victims were irrelevant. The recidivist were the fault of the prison not the prisoner. The harsher the conditions in jail some how contributed to the people committing crime, repeating the crime because they had not been weened off their preference whilst locked up. The low level of repeat offences in Scandinavian society was evidence of the success of much better conditions in Scandinavian prisons and should be followed here at home. No mention was made of the huge differences in society here and society there. No mention was made of the social concept of the Scandinavian society and the facilities outside prison. No it was all hobby horse stuff. Our prisons are awful and need to become more of a 'finishing school' for those people who had gone off the rails. Etonians beware.
The part religion plays in politics was suffused with the image that religion was a guide to our behaviour here on earth, how else would we get the rules to play by. The argument that the rules lie in the evolutionary need to perform in certain ways and predates religion by thousands of years of Darwinistic justification held no traction with the believers, especially the established church. Belief has to be the last bastion of the primitive man. There is no foundation other than the mystic for believing in any other power than that which lies within our own psychological make up and, as varied as that makeup is, are the myths we support in times of need.