OK, sure, it is possible to imagine a culture in which the principle of free speech is above and supersedes all other principles. That culture would be terrible. Suppose I'm at that bar and Nazi Bob starts spouting Nazi nonsense. Is there a social expectation that I stay and engage despite my desire to go somewhere else? If Nazi Bob hangs out at that bar all the time and I decide I don't want to go there because I don't like listening to him and calmly engaging with him is there a cultural stigma associated with that? If there's not, suppose I and a number of other patrons stop frequenting the bar. Is the bar tender then subject to some kind of social cost for saying "Hey Nazi Bob, I'm going to have to ask you to not come back because you're driving away other patrons?" I agree that the high school debate thing is bad, and in general I agree that people talking about ideas is good, but this idea that there should be no consequences whatsoever for what you say just doesn't survive even the briefest analysis. How would that even work? If you say some combination of words that elicits a reaction in me am I supposed to just not feel or think those things? Does that mean that I experience the consequences of your speech but you don't? Do I have freedom to not associate with you until you say something abhorrent? If I'm friends with someone and I say "Hey I think it would be really funny to flay your kids" or some other terrible thing do they have to just calmly debate that? Do they have to continue to associate with me because if they stopped being my friend that wouldn't be respecting my freedom to express my ideas? I'd argue that it's not only possible to respect freedom of speech as a principle balanced against other rights, it's _only_ possible to respect it as such, because otherwise the person with the loudest,most extreme, and most offensive ideas sets the tone of any conversation. If I don't have the option to get up and walk away, either literally or metaphorically, then my association with them and consequently my speech is coerced.
You've edited this at least twice since I started to write so who knows what this will by the time I hit 'reply', but this is really weird. If I can't choose not to associate with someone because of something they said then freedom of association just doesn't exist. If I can't kick someone out of my business because of something they've said then I just don't have control over whom I do business with. In a society with a cultural principle of free speech people would be able to exercise their right to say heinous things, and decent people would exercise their right to not have anything to do with those people, and the heinous thing saying people wouldn't whine about it, except disingenuously, because despite all their protestations they would actually understand that their right to free speech should not compel me to have them in my club, church, business, whatever.
I'm really, genuinely happy for you that the thing you're passionate about is something you're good at and is extremely lucrative, but if I tried to make a living doing what I'm passionate about I'd live in a cardboard box. The reality is that software eating the world (and admittedly a number of other things, but this is a big one) have made it much, much harder to make a living doing just about anything else. I got a job in software development because I was good enough at it and I needed to pay the loans from pursuing my passion. I continue doing software development because it's a way to eventually maybe escape capitalism without swallowing a bullet.
I'd hesitate to categorically lump all of the ancient mystery religions in with the rest of your list. Some of them were pretty strange, even for the ancient world, but e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries and Mithraism were very mainstream for hundreds of years.
Thank you for the recommendations. That's very helpful. I'm less bullish on bilingual editions (I know Ancient Greek well, and Latin a little less well, so I'm not totally uninformed) but I'm unlikely to ever be as proficient at Akkadian as I am at the languages I studied in college so I'm glad to know those exist.