Introduction A Conversation About Conversations
Any conversation between world views is a minefield of potential misconceptions, bad assumptions, emotional triggers, and a dozen other broken bridges of communication that leave far too many discussions in a flaming pile of futility. Conversation is hard. A person's world view is the foundation for everything they do. Every choice made, action taken, moral distinction advocated and opinion expressed comes from that world view. The problem is people believe what they believe based on a complicated collection of reasons, feelings, and influences that may not be fully understood or developed. A meaningful conversation requires the willingness to disturb that collection, to reanalyze our ideas and look at what they're made of without becoming hostile or defensive. That requires trust and openness, and more importantly, common ground on which to exchanges our ideas.
Every world view requires unsupported intellectual leaps that get us past the things we can't explain or understand.
Many, if not most of the discussions that spring up between disparate world views are dead on arrival. More often than not they devolve into a game of intellectual king of the hill with each participant standing on a completely different hill. Instead of shouting and throwing dirt at everybody who thinks our hill is ugly, we need to take a second look at what our hill is built on and built with. We need to get out the shovels and ensure that the ground beneath us is solid and reliable and that what we've built on it is a structure of organized, reasonable, and consistent conclusions, not simply a pile of strongly held opinions and desires.
Our aim is to find the small patches of common ground that exists between disparate world views and start the conversation there, where we can stand eye to eye and offer each other our best interpretation of the reality we share. It may be a short conversation. Every world view requires unsupported intellectual leaps that get us past the things we can't explain or understand. These leaps are what separate us and make further conversation difficult if not impossible, but it is in looking at these leaps and the reasons we take them that we learn the most about ourselves and others.
Some would like very much to claim that faith plays no role in their world view, but it's simply not true. Human knowledge is incomplete, at best, and that which can't be conclusively determined from the evidence provided by logic, science, or direct experience requires faith to accept. The distinction is simply in whom or in what that faith is placed. The reasons we use to make that choice are at the heart of who we are, who we want to be, and what we want from the world around us. If we truly want to understand each other, these reasons for faith should be the focus of our conversation.