Maybe U just hug'em?

We have debates, discussions, arguments, disagreements, whatever you want to call them all the time with other people. Some times they are close to us like family and friends and sometimes we just know them as acquaintances. Social media has increased the frequency and the access to argument and conflict. Most of the time we just don't get anywhere with it. We leave thinking, "they just don't get it." We may even think they are "stupid", a screw is loose upstairs, the elevator doesn't go to the top.

If we step back a bit, what is really going on. I have blogged about knowledge, truth, and faith and this blog fits into that stream of consciousness. What generally is happening is that we cannot come to the same conclusion, given we both have really good reasoning for our conclusion and can easily see flaws in their logic.

In reality, most people can put together decent rationale for their arguments and are somewhat offended when their capability is drawn into question. It is obvious there is real conflict, but while it appears to occur in the conclusions, it is not so obvious the conflict exists in the core assumptions from which the conclusions are derived.

Here is an ageless example. One of the main, if not the key, disagreement about Jesus is whether He is God or not. One reason for Islamic Jihad against Christians is because the Trinity violates Islam's belief there is only one true God worthy of worship. Claiming Jesus is God is blasphemous. The core assumptions behind this conflict came way before Mohammed wrote down the pillars of Islam. From the first Christmas the claim that Jesus is God was challenged. By Easter it was the chorus of the Gnostics. Who were these people and why did they not come to the same conclusion that the Apostles did?

There was a prevailing core assumption among Gnostics that matter and spirit could not coexist. Since God was spirit and Jesus was human, then Jesus could not be God. The Gnostic worldview actually came from the two Greek words for Knowledge, eido and gnosis. Eido is knowledge we gain through our physical senses and gnosis is knowledge we gain through experience not involving our physical senses. Gnosis knowledge then applied to knowledge of God or spirit world.

This is the basic worldview distinction that exist today and are core assumptions that determine most everything else we believe. If this binary option underwrites much of our conflict, how will we ever resolve conflict? We will never agree on conclusions if we start at different places. We will never prove Jesus is God through physical senses. At some point it is self evident to us that He is who He says He is or he is not. 

That is what we call faith. Faith is the core assumptions we hardly think about, find self evident and that we cannot prove. "Faith is the evidence of things not seen." I blogged previously that faith comes from the interplay and synergy of eido and gnosis. Maybe that is a good way to think about why we believe what we do. What seems crazy to me is not that some people are stupid and I am not, but that we rely on the debate of conclusions, ignoring the conflict in core assumptions from which disagreement comes.

We can continue the futile wars of logic, or we can debate something we cannot prove, or we can just hug 'em. That is the choice we can make ....