Introduction
Node LinkNextI've heard a Jew and a Muslim argue in a Damascus café with less passion than the Emacs wars.
— Ronald Florence
The main issue is people treating rules / laws / "orders from above" / what other people think / social norms / scientific 'facts' - even religious decrees or the American Constitution or the laws of Logic or those of maths as absolutes and dogma rather than as mere guidelines.
I met open-minded, enlightened, even self-critical, observant Jews, Christians, or Muslims (and a Sri-Lankan woman, who took care of my grandmother during her later years, identifies as both a Christian and a Buddhist). I also met close-minded and "professionally fanatic" xkcd fans, or My Little Pony fans or haters (see this thread for instance), and professional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans. And this is to say nothing of fanatical fans or fanatical foes of Apple Inc., rust-lang, git-scm, the Emacs text editor, FSF/GNU, pro/anti-Israel (or pro/anti-"Zionism"), Python-Lang, and the BSD family of operating systems - all of which have or had notoriously ardent zealots.
I decided to try and (at least passively) incorporate memes from other idea-systems or franchises even if they have some fanatical zealots.
And naturally, the harm done by overzealous xkcd fans (who usually at most can ban one from an Internet subforum) is small compared to the destructiveness of the Nazis, or early communists to say nothing of Genghis Khan's army. Note, however, that I believe later communists were reformed and that most of the best "alt-right" bloggers are parody ones, by inspiration from the Colbert Report.
Similarly, I suspect chapter I of Ezekiel was originally intended as an exaggerated parody of Polytheistic visions of revelation by Ezekiel who was a standup philosopher/comedian. Generations of scholars who considered it holy have tried to divine meaning from it, but it is pointless: Ezekiel was just making shit up.
I also suspect Plato’s "Republic" was similarly half tongue-in-cheek by Plato who described how he thought a country really should not be run. That was for the entertainment and education of the Greeks, who may have heard or uttered similar sentiments, and found them ridiculous when lumped together.