Alternate advice: practice skills of listening, observing, empathy, dialog, sharing, building. These are the skills you will need to deal with people.
People can have a difficult time talking about religion, politics, and programming languages because these issues affect their lives. When you say something that threatens another person’s life, expect a strong reaction to that threat. The key to having productive discussions about topics like these is to start with empathy, look for and diffuse threats, and seek a future state that creates space for the needs and goals of all stakeholders.
Edit: also, life is a lot more fun when approached with curiosity. Stay curious.
There are cases where someones entire life is founded on a lie and that no productive discussion is possible. Sure you can "discuss" these topics amicably but they always end up "agreeing to disagree". Nothing was changed, the needle wasn't moved.. the discussion was useless and unproductive.
The truly challenging question here is HOW do you have a truly productive discussion around these topics. Graham is right. The ONLY way is for someone to give up his identity. True dispassion. That is the only time when someone can truly discuss these hard topics "productively". There is literally no other way.
Your method involves sort of dancing around the controversial topic and having useless but amicable discussions. I think your advice leads to unproductive conversations and it's also really obvious knowledge that everyone is somewhat aware about.
But I'm happy to hear other peoples opinions! We can agree to disagree.
You are missing an important point of the poster: you have to abandon cageing self-prejudice - but at the same time, a similar operation should done one the image of the other. Give up identities (self-side) and give up prejudice (other-side).
People can have a difficult time talking about religion, politics, and programming languages because these issues affect their lives. When you say something that threatens another person’s life, expect a strong reaction to that threat. The key to having productive discussions about topics like these is to start with empathy, look for and diffuse threats, and seek a future state that creates space for the needs and goals of all stakeholders.
Edit: also, life is a lot more fun when approached with curiosity. Stay curious.