Cosmos Chapters 5 and 6

Before I start off on my useless yammerings...is anybody even reading this? If you are, I'm not going to force you to reply or anything, but I love hearing from you all, and any opinion or encouragement, or even criticism would be appreciated!
And, of course, you don't have to read it all...

On the wiki it said we needed to answer these questions instead, so here I go...
1)What does "Shared horizons or meaning" mean to you here at UK?
2)How does race, gender or background(rural or urban) impact those shared values?

1) So, I''m guessing that "shared horizons of meaning" means a community's shared values. And, I'm assuming that most people here at UK value education since they are paying to come here. Judging by how much people seem to study and how my sorority seems to be very protective of study habits, I'd say that for the most part, I've found this to be a truth. I hope that this respect for education continues, because I will more than likely rely on this understanding to make good grades.
2) I'm not going to say that race or gender have as large an impact on studying as background. I think, depending on what you've been raised around, you may see something as more rare and valuable, or you may recognize a significance in it. Or, you may completely take it forgranted. Like education as a value:if you went to school in a poor neighborhood, you may realize the importance of getting a good education, whereas if you live in a rich one, you may think education is just something you are forced to take part in.

First off, I want to answer the questions that were given to us, and then I will pose my own.
1) Why do we bother having conversations?
Though many of us have the same values, we argue over their significance and application. For ex. Many of us value our human lives, but when does the life of an unborn fetus begin?
>>>Is abortion murder?
Feel free to post on this topic if you like, but please keep it short, and not the usual 'it's just killing.' Try to back up your answers.

We hole conversations to learn to "get along." (p.78)

2)Strangers:Who are the imaginary ones, and are there more types of strangers? What kind are they?
I think that the imaginary stranger is the person from another country that you haven't met, and another type is the type that's near you. Possibly, people that you have met but don't know everything about. (Because you can never know everything about any one person)
An encounter between strangers might lead to understanding as you compare likes(non-human universals) and therefore, become interested in the things that you may not share. ex. Punjabs worry about Punjabis in Canada, and therefore become interested in Canadian lifestyle and customs.

Now here are my comments and questions:
p.69-70
But when the issue is what to do, differences in what we think and feel can fall away. Indeed, our political coexistence, as subjects or citizens, depends on being able to agree about practices while disagreeing about their justification. This doesn't necessarily mean, however, that they will. An example of this is what happened between us and Japan during WW2. Japan's pride forced them to refuse to surrender, and thus, political conflict continued to rise.
p.69
Who but someone in the grip of a terrible theory would want to insist on an agreement on principles before discussing which movie to go to, what to have for dinner, when to go to bed?
Do we have time to worry about whether we're making the best decisions? Do we have the time not to?
p.70-71
If the government isn't allowed to have anything to do with religion, but our rules are based off of what we're used to and have seen before, then how is our Constitution truly free of the values of a predominately Christian society? Are values connected to religion? Are there some rules that other cultures with another predominant religion would disagree with? What about the forest societies that practice cannibalism?
p.70
I think the government's treatment of the first amendment is a combination of protecting the gov. from religion and religion from the gov., protecting the people from the civil discord brought on by forcing a certain religion, a commitment to the sovereignty of the human conscience and religious toleration as an end.
p.73
A large part of what we do we do because it is just what we do.
Think of it in this way. When we go on vacation, our schedule gets changed and we sleep later; sometimes we miss our favorite shows on television. When we take trips to anywhere, what we normally do gets thrown off. We each have our own unique style of living. But it can be changed when we go somewhere or choose to live somewhere else.

Rationalization of what we do usually comes after the intuitive reaction, but is this really a problem if many things turn out as unplanned anyway?

If we didn't have the right to protest traditional unwritten rules of society in a non-harmful way, how else would change occur?

Page 79
"You taught me language and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse."
Does anyone else hate it when someone teaches a foreigner curse words when they first get here? That totally bugs me!!

Page 83
Is it our fault if our commercial messages unintentionally persuade the attitudes of people in other places?