Random Thought #110

I really enjoyed the concept behind this lady's talk. Its about disagreeing to produce progress. I don't enjoy disagreement for the sake of disagreement but I think disagreement can open our eyes and minds to the point where we can greatly enhance our understanding and progress to higher learning. The key to disagreement is that is must be permitted and it must be embraced and encouraged with the right intent. Too many of us live in our bubble of comfort and if an idea doesn't go along with our preconceived ideas, we immediately dismiss it as incorrect. Just like my hepatitis example. If I were to believe that Hepatitis was some disease that didn't affect the liver and I refused to allow anyone to disagree with me or to even consider their ideas, I would be completely wrong and yet feel completely right and alienate a lot of people an lose a chance and learning something new. The problem with our preconceived ideas is that they are shaped by our experience. We are a product of our environment whether we like it or not. I'm reading a book by Stephen R. Covey right now called "The Divine Center" and the entire 1st chapter of his book talks about this principle. He uses a picture to illustrate his point. He has one person looks at a picture that looks like a beautiful young lady looking off to the side. Then he shows a different person a picture similar to the first but is more obvious that it looks like an old lady with a big nose. Then he shows both people a slightly modified version of the picture that has elements of both of the previous pictures and asks each to convince the other of what they see. What do you think happens? The person who originally saw the young lady naturally sees the young lady and the same for the other. So they have a disagreement and unless one opens their comfort bubble and tries to see things from the other person's perspective, they are losing out on an opportunity to learn and see things from a different perspective, which can be quite gratifying. I also think we suffer from this in the Church. We are so indoctrinated into believing and regurgitating Sunday School answers and basic doctrines, we are often dis-interested in other people's beliefs and immediately condemn them for being "wrong". However, we are conditioned by our circumstances. Consider what we experience every week in church and what we hear in the news and via media outlets about events in the Middle East. Guess how many members of the church known anything about Islam? Or what do you think they picture about the Middle East? The sad part is that the history of the Book of Mormon and the Bible comes from the Middle East. Do you know how much better we could understand the scriptures if we actually learned about that part of the world? Do you know how many similarities that are between the gospel of Islam/Judaism/Christianity? We cannot afford to sit in our comfort bubbles and tune the rest of the world out. We simply can't. Here is the link to the talk http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree.html