Alan Jacobs at the The American Conservative

In general, practicing such triage is okay — indeed, it has to be okay because there’s no plausible alternative until we live much longer, eliminate sleep, and acquire faster internal processors — but it’s the sort of thing that can easily go wrong, primarily because, as a self-justifying defense mechanism, we try to fortify our position by attacking or dismissing all the people who believe the things that we’ve decided not to investigate.

And this is what bothers me: I really dislike writing people off. In fact, I believe that as a Christian I am forbidden to write people off, or to assume that they have worse reasons for holding their views than I have for holding mine. (Didn’t Jesus say something relevant about motes and beams?)