This flowchart, from an atheist group, is overly specific to their subject but, for me, a good guideline.



If your "opinion" isn't open to this kind of debate, it isn't an opinion, but a religious belief or an article of faith. Which get treated quite differently than opinions. You change an opinion with data. You change faith with emotional experience.

My own position is that "not judging" is an utter crock, in the sense that we always judge in reality, it's just a fundamental mechanism that human minds use, and not judging is as unlikely a phenomenon as not thinking - and I mean the whole mind not thinking, not the meditation technique of quieting your self-reflective mind to hear the other stuff. The other stuff is thinking too, and it ALL has to shut up before you can say you're not thinking (i.e. in a coma, not even hallucinating or dreaming). Likewise, not to judge would be not to discriminate - by ANY criteria. Not race, or gender, but live/dead, friend/stranger, employee/customer - ALL of these are forms of discrimination - people are treated differently based on what category they belong to.

The trick with judging is to not imagine your judgments to have any more significance or scope than they do. If someone's religion is fucked, that's one person, not one religion. If one nation's worth of religious people is fucked, that's one nation, not the whole world. If yo like or dislike something, you are you, and not a representative of a demographic. The royal "we" has no place in your judgments, nor does the "is of identity".

OF COURSE people don't all have the right to believe what they want. Airplane pilots do not have the right to believe in the flat earth theory, while taxi drivers do. Geologists do not have the right to reject plate tectonics, while plastics engineers do. Police officers do not have the right to believe in child abuse as a control technique, but ministers do.

I think of fundamental rights as attributes of people, not attributes of the roles that people assume. A person has a right to believe in a flat earth. The people who run airlines and enforce air safety simultaneously have the right to consider that belief a disqualification for allowing that person to become or remain a pilot.

Not all rights can be exercised free of all negative consequences. While rights are more protected than mere privileges, in practice few rights can be considered absolute, particularly where one person's rights conflict with another's. The right of hundreds of people to travel safely exceeds the right of a person believing in a flat earth to work as a pilot.

The first meaning relates to evaluation, discernment or assessment. This meaning is oriented toward reaching a factual conclusion based on observations. We all do this. So long as we remember that all such conclusions are provisional and depend on the validity of our observations, it presents no real problem.

The more problematic meaning is that of approval or condemnation - especially the latter. I tend not to judge peoples' beliefs, but rather their actions. If someone behaves well - charitably, helpfully, lovingly - then I don't care if their motivation springs from a belief in inclusive fitness or a belief in heaven and hell. If someone behaves harmfully or hatefully, I don't care if they believe in eternal salvation or social Darwinism. Their actions are the important thing.

Yet even when someone behaves poorly I tend to cut them a lot of slack. This is because I believe in the value of compassion - I follow the advice, "Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle." Learning how to cut people slack is an ongoing process, because I have spent over 50 years operating from judgment and so far only a handful operating from compassion.

...of judgment quite a bit, not just in how they talk about contentious issues like religion, but in how they think about such issues and how they think disagreement should be handled.

The result is a lot of people getting judgmental in the condemnation sense about other people exercising judgment in the evaluation sense, offering sanctimonious advice and mind-numbing platitudes, recommending mental gymnastics which make no sense and which they themselves are incapable of performing.

The chance to use such situations as a mirror to let us look inward and discover how we share those same shortcomings. The practice of compassion always begins by extending it to oneself.

It’s very difficult to change someone else’s behaviour. When people are judgmental, closed-minded or stupid, we have a natural tendency to get annoyed. We blame them, rail against them, exhort them to change their attitudes, call them names, accuse them of nefarious conversational behaviour etc. The problem is that this gets us upset and in most cases does absolutely nothing to change their attitudes, beliefs or behaviour. So what’s the point of doing that? Do we like getting upset?

In fact I did used to be addicted to outrage, because it affirmed my sense of being right and cemented my membership in a community of those who thought like me. The problem was that it also fostered a sense of my own victimhood – I was reacting to the behaviour of others and was no longer master of my own ship. Eventually I got tired of being a victim. I realized that if I stopped becoming outraged I would no longer e letting others drive my emotional bus. So I quit reacting to others with judgment and outrage.

The short form is that you can’t change others, you can only change yourself.

Not reliably, maybe not as intended, but if no change at all was possible, why bother communicating at all?

In the past decade support for gay marriage has gone from a minority position to a majority position. That's people changing other people.

Last edited Thu Mar 1, 2012, 01:57 PM - Edit history (1)

The most we can do is put out reasons why a different approach might be preferable. What people do with the info is up to them. Communication is valuable, but pounding on people over your perceptions of their psychological deficiencies is about the most pointless form of non-communication there is.

...the lamp has to light itself -- which, now that I say it, is something I can easily imagine being spouted as "wisdom" by some self-proclaimed new-agey guru.

Changes in people are a process, a chain of events. Your decision to focus on what happens inside a person doesn't make other parts of that chain of events, the external parts that lead up to an internal change, less important.

Exposure to new ideas doesn't happen if other people keep their ideas to themselves. And it's hardly a proven fact that only the most gentle, non-challenging introductions to new ideas work, or even that such delicacy is always the best way.

Communication is valuable, nobody changes without being exposed to different information. But unless they're willing to accept it, nothing happens. Look at all the climate change deniers.

My point is that it's pointless to get pissed off or talk down to people who insist on hanging onto positions you disagree with. The only person you can guarantee to affect by doing that is yourself.