[Welcome back, ArtAppraiser, even if a short visit - had thought I'd be gone long before you. Plus as response to Mike Maiello and in general thoughts on our cultural jiu-jitsu]

In answer to "People get a bit of a pass for their religion-based intolerances."  Like duh, when something's a 4000 year old tradition, it tends to carry weight. As do other long-standing traditions along with well-cemented ideas or structures, even if recent.

But we do seem to get a lot of glee telling those people who haven't "evolved" that they're haters and wrong, rather than acknowledging the journey and changing positions we're all in.

The "marketplace of ideas" doesn't have to look like a free-for-all internet bazaar where the weakest get slapped down and the strong survive, whether it's the anti-liberal right or anti-right liberals.

There are people who are hard sells, and then there are people who just have their past customs and belief systems but may open to new ideas. Believe it or not, we all pretty well fall somewhere in these 2 categories, due to religion or lack of, ethnic background, social milieu, upbringing, happenstance of info encountered, et al.

The Nürnberg trials pretty well destroyed the case for human exceptionalism - we can all be deceived or deceive ourselves, create our own monsters, follow the crowd, et al.

Our terrorist hit 15 years ago set us off balance, spinning out of orbit, fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar.

Yet pitted against that gloomy view, we see a steady winding down of wars, international cooperation, improved if not perfect acceptance of other cultures and skin colors, steady if not maddeningly slow acceptance of women as equals, et al. Society is improving despite fits and starts.

Our labels are not the end of the line on values. I'm drawn back to Haight-Ashbury lately, as a brilliant revolution and a huge disappointment together - a great wellspring of new and refurbished philosophies and creativity and experimentation combined with both pleasant and sad new realities.

We will find the limitations of our own times. Some of the people we call backwards may have a better clue to survival from the trendiness & often time-wastingness of social media, the hubris of thinking we've got millenia-old human relations problems worked out by numbers, even the feeling that everything will be okay with another Google search or venture capital investment in some trendy new save-the-world startup idea.

That 14-year-old shooting smack on the corner and whoring herself to pay the bills doesn't seem so revolutionary 50 years later. Those square religious types condemning it don't seem quite so wrong even if their total message might not have been so right.

By labeling everything that goes against latest trends and acceptance as "intolerance", we stamp a pretty self-assured value on our own beliefs and a pretty condemning one on those who disagree.

History is much more even-handed, showing sometimes we were right, sometimes wrong.

Thus the beauty of wading into discussions on endless possibilities with a spark of acceptance that anyone who disagrees might not have their head completely up their ass.

Even be they Strom Thurmond or David Duke, Awlaki or Assad, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell,  Ron Paul, Cliven Bundy....  Or especially smaller less powerful versions of these archetypes or those we simplistically categorize that way due to laziness, mistake or convenience.

Martin Luther King talked about understanding the people who opposed him, understanding their reasons and motives, not condemning them as people, only their flawed ideas. He learned from them, not to judge them.

The world will find its balance, and it's up to us to understand the levers and weights and figure out the new equilibrium. 

Here's how our solar system looks today, as of 13 hours ago - not as we knew as kids or even as my kids knew it. As something surprisingly new, more complex yet still obvious and harmonious. Planet 9 is no longer Pluto but something even more remote and less visible. If we can't get the basics of our Solar System right, what makes us think we have a sure grip on matters of the soul and conscience?

We're all babes in the woods, struggling to stand or crawl, sometimes laughing or holding in contempt the others. In 50 years, it will all look so different.

Here's how our "modern" TV looked just 50 years ago, not so modern looking anymore - and here's how Death came calling in 1962 - not with a bang, but with a whisper. That's the nicer way to instill change. Used to catch more flies with honey - now you get them via Facebook fatwah.

And here's Plan 9 from Outer Space (not the Johnny Depp version)