# Religion, Politics, War and Compromises

Compromising on the quality of your message can allow you to reach a wider 
audience and finding the perfect balance can be difficult. The media, for 
example, has to constantly balance between sensationalizing their articles 
while at the same time staying close to the facts. If we are more 
emotionally driven, we tend to lean more towards sensational topics because 
they provoke strong emotions. This also happens when we talk about politics 
as it is a lot easier to point fingers than being in charge of the policies 
ourselves where you have to make a choice between the lesser of two evils 
and no matter what you choose, you end up taking the blame. There are a lot 
of studies on how to increase the efficiency of a society but applying 
these theories to reality tends to be quite a challenge. There is a lot of 
corruption in politics and swaying public opinion to push one's agenda is 
often easy to achieve if there is enough funding behind it. It is not black 
and white though and we have come a long way. Take war for example, nuclear 
weapons have brought nations to a point where war between them would lead 
to mutually assured destruction and force us to resolve conflicts 
differently, resulting in the level of peace we experience today. And while 
almost everyone is against war, you don't always need much to sway public 
opinion when fear tactics come into play. Sometimes you don't really have a 
choice though as humans are capable of doing horrible things to each other.

We tend to have very polarized views when it comes to religion. The issue 
at hand is not so much what someone believes but rather to which extent 
they are radical about it. The Backfire Effect tends to make people more 
inclined to further reinforce and impose the beliefs that they hold. This 
has been demonstrated in psychological tests; when we are faced with 
counter-evidence for beliefs that we are attached to, our convictions are 
often strengthened rather than weakened. An accepting approach is 
statistically more likely to make people open up. That is why it is better 
to value people based on their actions rather than their beliefs. Because 
every belief has a mixture of good and bad and the real danger is when we 
start to see our way of thinking as the only way. After all, whether our 
paradigm is mainly religious or scientific, there is no such a thing as an 
absolute truth.