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Today's
quotation:
It is amazing how many
people think that they can
answer an argument by
attributing bad motives to those
who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning,
you can believe or not
believe anything about anything,
without having to bother
to deal with facts or logic.
Thomas Sowell
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Today's
Meditation:
How
do we face the world? How do we treat other people
in this amazing world of ours? Do we treat their
ideas and arguments with respect, or do we try to slam
their thoughts and discredit them without even examining
the thoughts themselves? We seem to be dealing with
a time in our history in which the personal attack is
gaining more and more credibility, without any regard at
all about whether we're actually facing any genuine issues
at all.
If
I have an idea that contradicts one of your deepest
convictions, it's very tempting to try to discredit me by
focusing on something other than my idea. Perhaps my
motives are unethical. Perhaps my upbringing makes
me incompetent to disagree with you. But what about
my idea? If you try to discredit me without
examining the idea, then you're rejecting-- not just
losing-- the chance to learn something new and important
about your own beliefs. And the shame of that is
that if you do make the effort to examine my idea, you
might find that your own beliefs are more strongly
reinforced. But even if they aren't, it would be
important for you to find that out, too.
We
don't have a lot of role models these days in respecting
the power of logic and reason. And while these two
qualities most definitely don't explain everything about
everything, they are important gifts that we as human
beings seem to have been given exclusively on this planet.
For us to ignore their power just to hold on to our own
beliefs without dealing with facts is one of the most
disrespectful things that we can do to the gift-giver,
whomever you believe that being to be.
Do
my thoughts contradict yours? Then please do me the
favor, as a fellow human being with similar gifts, of
considering the possibility that there may be some reason
behind what I think. I do deserve that respect, just
as everyone else on this planet-- all of our fellow human
beings-- deserves.
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