Listen to other points of view

The way our opinions colour the way we react and view things is a subject I've written about in the past but this week has been a real eye opener to me in how much it can completely blind a person to any other way of thinking.

Getting feedback on articles that I write has always been a pleasure for me - whether the feedback is positive or negative.

From a vanity side of things, it's nice to know that people actually bother taking a few minutes out of their day to read what I have to say but on a much larger scale, the pleasure comes from the fact that people are open to views they would otherwise not have thought of and it proves a welcome break to the all-too-often mundane tendency of just following the crowd.

I was happy this week to receive some spirited debate in response to my last article and enjoyed the intellectual challenge or defending my point while at the same time learning other points that I might not have thought of previously.

What wasn't quite so much fun was the prejudiced soap boxes stood on by a small minority who (I doubt deliberately but can't be sure) instead of reading my words with an open mind, read them with the shouts of their own biased opinions resounding in their heads.

The ability to think for ourselves and rationalise without outside influence is a God given gift that all too many people choose to set aside in favour the easier route of simply following the flow of popular opinion.

A closed mind and the herd mentality are the enemies of a civilised society - and how someone like Hitler was able to garner so much support.

As a columnist it's my job to give all sides of an argument however unpopular it might be. While playing devil's advocate is something I find intellectually interesting, the real reason for doing so is to point out that there is always more than one view to anything that happens in this world.

Moving away from the subject of last week's debate onto a topical case in point to the world we live in, would be the subject of the school shootings that take place all too often.

The vast majority of people (and to avoid any misconception that I may condone such a thing, I am officially going on the record saying that includes me) would condemn the practice of walking into a crowded school and shooting people at random.

As open minded as I like to think I am, understanding how a person can bring themselves to take the lives of innocent people is beyond my comprehension but with that said, I have no doubt in my mind that the person doing the dead has a reason that they view as rational for doing so.

Although not impossible, it's unlikely that they would just wake up one morning and decide to go on a killing rampage just because they've got nothing better to do that day. It's far more likely that their perception of life around them has propelled them to do so. They have their reasons for doing what they do.

Doubtlessly the reason would make no sense to most of us but in their own mind they truly believe that what they are doing is right.

When you think about it, however much other people's views may displease and confuse us, if we refused to accept that they have their reason for doing and believing what they believe, we would be incapable of making sense of the many tragedies that happen around the world on a daily basis.

Without the ability to make sense of things, no matter how alien to us, how are we supposed to function in our day to day lives?

Refusing to accept the possibility that others may views things differently to ourselves, closes us off to opportunities of learning new things and expanding our scope of knowledge.

How can we call ourselves a fair and civilised society if the only opinion we accept is our own?

Isn't it that very view that has resulted in a 75-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia being sentenced to 40 lashes and four months in prison for the crime of allowing two men into her home to deliver bread to her.

The ruling by the court was based on 'citizen information' rather than actual proof but the real crime is in believing that the woman was doing something immoral. According to the laws of the land, because she wasn't related to the two young men who brought her the five loaves of bread, she was committing a crime allowing them in her home and as such both she and the young men who wanted to help her are to be punished.

It is a single minded determination of what is right and what is wrong that has allowed in my opinion such a travesty of justice to take place.

There quite simply can be no justification to single minded autonomy. While it's human nature to believe that what we believe is right, we do ourselves, and others around us, no favours by refusing to accept the possibility that others they have a right to believe differently - or more to the point we might simply be mistaken in our understanding of what happened.