I see the opposite of Jefferson’s wise approach commonly being celebrated on FB.

A few months ago, I was booted from a decades-long friendship by a woman who insisted, out of the blue, that I needed to acknowledge the unparalleled wisdom of the Roman Catholic Church. Ideological purity tests everywhere I look these days. This is exactly what Terror Management Theory predicts when death is in the air, when mortality is “salient.”

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Supp 2025.09.16

“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”
Thomas Jefferson [In a letter to William Hamilton on April 22, 1800.]