Actually I believe that you learn a lot more when you engage with people who disagrees with you. The process of trying to explain yourself clearly has great personal benefits.
One good thing about engaging with strangers over the Internet is this, you get to interact with people with very different views of life. Often the friends you meet in your daily life either think very much the same as you, for example church friends, or are unwilling to engage you in any deep intellectual topics. Furthermore, because you know one another in real life, the conversation is often very polite and you won’t really know what the other person really thinks.
But on the Internet, you solve both problems. First, you get to engage with people who think very differently from you. Second, because you will not meet each other in real life, you often get very frank opinions being shared.
There is a flip side to that second point of course, when you know for sure you will never meet them in real life, its much easier for some of them to start insulting you and making other personal remarks while debating, that is unfortunate but is something that is beyond your control.
What is under your control is your own response and I can see the silver lining behind it, it teaches you not to repay like for like, but rather, trains you to truly understand that, you can only control your response to whatever life throws at you.
But the good thing of course, is that only with debating others, that you have an incentive to understand more the other party’s view of the issue, and whether or not you agree with them in the end, your knowledge base expands.
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