Different people see the world in different ways. Our vision is governed by our environment, by the people who we live with, by our friends and relatives, by our interpretation of events around us, by our personal faiths and beliefs (which are also governed largely through a combination of luck and self-awareness).
This truth thus begs the question: do we actually have a choice as to what we believe to be right or wrong? If we are a product of our environment, how much choice do we have when we rarely have a chance to choose our environment?
Imagine this scenario: Abraham is born in the cross-fire that is the Middle East. He is a Jew, his parents are Jews, his relatives are Jews. In fact, everyone he knows is a Jew because he was born into a Jewish family with Jewish traditions. His environment is a violent one: he has seen his friends (also Jews) blown to pieces by terrorists claiming to be Muslims. All that he is exposed to in the media, in his school textbooks, his home is that Muslims and Palestinians are evil. He grows up hating them. How much choice does he have in controlling his hate? How much choice does he have in believing what he believes? His environment has conditioned his values into a particular manner. Now replace, "Abraham" with "Muhammad": a Muslim boy caught in the cross-fire of Israeli bullets and bombs. The outcome is the same: an individual who has very little "real" choice.
What about a person born into a deeply religious Christian family in the deep south of the USA? From birth, he is taught to believe that Jesus is God. In his lifetime, he never has any reason to leave his sleepy little town of 5,000 people. In his lifetime, the only time he hears about Islam is in the same sentence as the word "terrrorist". He dies one day, a devout, God-fearing, charitable Christian who has never done anything to hurt anyone in his life. Muslims are taught to believe that he will burn in Hell for all eternity. What did he ever do wrong to deserve that fate? His environment made it impossible for him to ever discover the true Islam.
Don't tell me that its the onus of a person to break free from his environment to improve himself. That would be terribly naive: a happy person in a happy environment has absolutely no reason to search for something else.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with diversity. It leaves us with differences in opinion. It leaves us with a wide-ranging kaleidescope of experiences begotten from an equally wide range of environments. It doesn't make any one opinion right, though some of us make think ourselves more right than the next person. When we put ourselves on the moral perch and begin to preach, that's when wars are started.
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