Wrestling with contraries

A while back, I posted something about healing the world. I made reference to that whole prop 8 thing that was going on about a year ago and said that I thought each side of the argument saw the other side as an exaggerated caricature of who they really are. Some smart lady left a comment on that blog post in which she quoted James Harvey Robinson, an American Historian, who said, “Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other.”

Two assumptions that I agree contribute to the curse. One, that every issue has just two sides and two, that it’s our duty to choose a side. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take a stand for what we believe in. I just think we should hold off sometimes in doing that until we go through a process. Too often we take the lazy route and just adopt the side that we would be expected to adopt. I’m a republican/democrat and this is what a republican/democrat believes. I’m a Mormon and this is what a Mormon would believe.

We do it with politics and other issues and we also do it with people. I’ve decided I don’t like that person so I’m going to ignore anything good they might have to say and focus on finding faults to further justify my feelings toward that person. The opposite could also be true. I think that person is amazing and I will mold and shape my beliefs according to what that person says/believes. We try to figure out what box to put people in so that we can then know how to treat them.

My friend O-Mo recently posted something interesting and a little bit vague, which I thought was smart. When I first read it, I thought he was merely stating two sides of an argument and demonstrating that he was comfortable not choosing a side for now but merely considering both sides of an issue. I think I came to this conclusion because one of the things that I admire about O-Mo is that he’s willing to acknowledge and explore the many sides of an issue without feeling like he needs to immediately adopt a side. He clarified what he was trying to do in the next post and said he meant Chris to be a gender-neutral name and that the arguments presented could be used to promote either same sex marriage or opposite sex marriage. I wasn’t dead on with what he was trying to do, but was pretty close.

An anonymous somebody left what I thought was great comment. He starts out by quoting Joseph Smith, who taught that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” Go back and read the comment, it’s really great. I guess the purpose of this post is to encourage more of that in myself. To allow myself to acknowledge and explore the good and bad of the many different sides of an issue or person instead of immediately trying to fit something into one of my own premade boxes.