Lent Day 27 – (23 for me)

It’s late but I wanted to check in before I hit the hay.  My daughter set up a puzzle on the kitchen table tonight and did a fair bit of it before she went to bed.  It’s a 500 piece puzzle so it’s substantial – not the kind of puzzle you finish in less than an hour.  So I sat down to put in a few pieces.  This is a dangerous thing for me.  I love doing puzzles.

There’s this thing that happens with me when I sit down to do puzzles.  I sit down and I look for pieces, scanning back and forth across the surface, and I think.  As I search, my mind wanders and ponders various things.  I have imaginary conversations and debates with people.

As I was going through this tonight, I thought that it would be fun to try and take some of my thoughts and put them down in a post instead of letting them float off into the ether as I usually do.

But then, as I was thinking about that, I was thinking about the fact that I was thinking about the Trump administration and one particular item that popped up and caught my eye in the last couple of days.  I felt that it’s probably not a good idea to put too many of those thoughts into posts.  I want to fight that urge.  Enough people are saying enough things about it all that I don’t need to add my voice.

But I do find myself longing to draw people together.  With social media, there’s so much opportunity for people of different stripes to toss digital grenades at each other.  There’s so many zingers and mic drops flying all over the place that it’s hard to stay on top of things.  Often, as I observe a particular thread with people challenging other people, I find myself wishing that I could somehow get the people together and help them to debate or to argue better.

This is a very strange thought because I’m not very good at debating.  I’m terrible at arguing.  I’ve very slow on my feet and so I avoid it if at all possible.  I also don’t like conflict (which is perhaps why I find myself wanting to bring people together) so I don’t want to push my point.  I worry about offending.  I want to listen and so I may ease off on pushing my point to try and understand someone else’s side.

But when I observe other people arguing I enjoy looking at the argument from above to try and see how they might be able to resolve their differences and I find that often people are arguing about the wrong things.

If an atheist and a theist were having an argument, they might argue about beliefs, or the fallibility or infallibility of a holy book or something like that.  These are all very interesting things to debate, but really, there’s no point in debating them between a theist and an atheist, because if your assumption is that there is no God, then of course these beliefs and stories will look ridiculous, but if your assumption is that there is a divine being with infinite power residing within the universe, then these things suddenly become very plausible.  If you’re going to have an argument, argue about the existence of the divine – argue about the possibility that energy has a consciousness (that’s a weird one – I just made it up).  Argue about the origins of the universe – where mass and energy came from.

It seems like people love to act incredulous and insult each other on social media when it comes to something like politics and I look at it and I think to myself, “If you just took a few minutes and tried to imagine what it would be like to hold the same base assumptions as this other person, then maybe they wouldn’t seem to be so idiotic.  Maybe you might see the situation from a new angle and might be able to frame your point in a new way – maybe you might even be able to frame it in such a way that the other person might be able to hear you.

It’s a bit of a pipe dream perhaps.  So many of these debates are so polarized – it’s more about cogently expressing anger than it is about trying to convince someone of something – or at least, I don’t imagine that people genuinely think that the person they’re insulting is going to listen.  And of course, there’s all the people who are lying badly and transparently so.  It’s like watching a child try to steal a cookie right in front of you.  There’s no thought of trying to debate that sort of thing.

Now, I should be clear that I’m thinking of things on twitter where people respond to someone else’s tweet, not necessarily for the other person’s sake, but for the sake of their followers – people who are already convinced.  It’s more of a, “Can you believe this?” kind of tweet.  I doubt that there are many people out there who actually think that a person with a million twitter followers is going to read, consider and be moved by their two line zinger.

I just know for myself, if I was going to get into an argument on twitter, I would actually want to figure out the point we actually disagreed on and talk about that.  I would want to understand the other person and to be heard myself.  More than anything, I think I would want to come closer together – to increase understanding.

Like I said, I don’t get into debates much, and I certainly don’t think that I’ll be joining twitter any time soon.  It’s probably best to stick with puzzles.

 

 

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