Being raised in an atheists’ family, I often looked at people from all sorts of religious and spiritual backgrounds and wondered why they were doing all these strange things they were doing. I’m sure I was not the only one as even people of the different religions often wonder why others are doing what they do, often not questioning their faith.
But, if we don’t know or understand something today, while millions of other people do, it is likely that other people know something that we don’t. It may be unknown to us today but can hold an exciting piece of information that has the potential to change our lives. In this respect, it is interesting to challenge our assumptions by studying things that we don’t quite understand or plain disagree with. Only by being open and looking at the other side of a coin we can learn new truths.
In this respect, I like the statement that claims that every argument sounds excellent until we hear the other side. I often listen to people being very opinionated about specific points of view, utterly unaware of the opposite argument. What they say makes sense until it is challenged, and suddenly it doesn’t make sense. So, can the opposite be true too? Often it is, but only to a certain extent. Radical points of view are mostly incorrect. There are always two sides to everything, like yin-and-yang. And while some things seem obvious to us today, like don’t kill and don’t use drugs, in some particular occasions and to some people, these views will make sense.
The solution, of course, is to do both. It is to be our own devil’s advocate. We should be able to argue both sides of our views. Until then, all our beliefs can be baseless, uninformed, and often wrong. True mastery comes when we can accept and reject specific ideas at the same time.
