We don’t hold the same beliefs. I guarantee it.
Beliefs are personal convictions about how we see the world. No matter how many humans have or will exist in the entire history of our species, no two will ever share the exact same combination of beliefs.
Here’s why: In order to forge a deeply held conviction, an individual will spend a long time at the anvil of their mind, hammering away with their personal experiences. Experiences are largely informed by the culture that person lives in, including everything from faith to morality. If I want to change your beliefs, my best bet is to influence your personal experiences and let you adjust your hammering yourself.
I will not try to convince you to abandon your current beliefs. I may not like your beliefs, and I may judge you for holding them, but we can agree to disagree on every single one if necessary. Your beliefs are right (for you), and mine are right (for me).
Your opinions, on the other hand, are wrong. Unless they happen to be almost the same as my current opinions, in which case, I think you’re pretty cool.
That’s because opinions are supposed to be reasonable conclusions made by evaluating factual evidence. Facts, if you recall, are verifiable truths, sans evaluation. The research to verify a fact sometimes has to rely on opinions, like testimony from observers, but we judge these facts to be less valuable due to their tainted basis.
Things like video recordings of a murder are filled with facts if clearly visible (and unaltered): who was there, what movements they made, when they did it, and so on. Wouldn’t life be easy then if everyone could watch the same video and all come away from it with the same opinions? Impossible. The hiccup, of course, is that what one decides is reasonable and how one evaluates evidence are both going to be inadvertently influenced by one’s own beliefs.
We humans try to form subcultures around shared opinions because we likely share some beliefs, but inevitably end up in the same boat as people with beliefs we are resistant to. Turns out, it is possible to arrive at the same opinion through different beliefs. Those people probably share most opinions with the subculture, but likely also have other problematic opinions.
It used to be customary to denounce the fringe beliefs in one’s subculture when discovered, even if they overlapped or led to the same opinions of that group. The ends (pursuing change based on shared opinions) did not justify the means (support from people with repugnant beliefs and opinions).
But, as power is wont to do, it has finally corrupted even this most fundamental tenet of our society: Don’t associate yourself with terrible people. Instead, there are now “some very fine people on both sides.”
The other tenet in those situations used to be to step back and ask why your opinions were shared by those people with terrible beliefs in the first place. Reevaluate how you arrived at those opinions; reexamine the evidence that you interpreted to point you in this direction. Maybe you made a wrong turn if you ended up at the same destination as people with terrible beliefs.
And here is where we find the commonality with most of the groups who have ceased the shunning of terrible beliefs: they don’t do the reevaluation anymore either. As it turns out, some opinions are not actually opinions, because they are based overwhelmingly on beliefs, not the facts. Those types of non-opinions are more accurately called prejudices, and self-evaluation of a prejudice is decidedly inconceivable because your beliefs are deeply held convictions.
So no, I don’t respect your opinion, just your right to have it. You have no right to your prejudice.
