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My experience has been this is a recipe for becoming an admirably open, yet unlikable person.

I'm actually in the process of heading in the other direction. In fact, I think that I recently lost a budding friendship because of a heated political discussion.

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Sorry to hear that, but its been my experience that a friendship that gets tripped up by relatively superficial differences like that is probably not a strong friendship to begin with. I am not old, but the older I get, the less I feel like religion and politics are relevant to a person's personality. At the risk of trivializing them too much, I almost think of them as a team allegiance like rooting for the Packers vs the Steelers... While there are consequences for what people believe, in terms of a friendship, these things really don't matter to me.

Well, in my defense I did say it was a "budding friendship".

However, I literally have never had a positive experience discussing religion or politics, except with people with whom I already agree.

I have a personal rule to never do so, and I've even attempted to apply that to the Internet and failed on several occasions. Yet, I regret having tried in each case.

I actually made a pretty good friend out of it.

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