Comments on: Protecting the questions and living into the answers http://natebettger.com/2009/06/23/protecting-the-questions-and-living-into-the-answers/ Building bridges, connecting community, village alchemy . Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:42:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: b0b pearson http://natebettger.com/2009/06/23/protecting-the-questions-and-living-into-the-answers/#comment-868 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:20:16 +0000 http://natebettger.com/2009/06/22/protecting-the-questions-and-living-into-the-answers/#comment-868 So the “question” to ask is how can we hold our own strong views. perspectives, and beliefs and also engage with others in discussing their strong views, perspectives and beliefs. If we go to the position of avoiding the differences and conflicts I believe that this is just avoidance of conflict and not truly bringing your true self to the community. We must agree to disagree but not try not to disagree. Engaging in our differences helps us to form our true understandings, and know what we truly believe.

Watering down our differences to avoid conflict is a recipe for false community.

]]> By: Jennie Hoffmann http://natebettger.com/2009/06/23/protecting-the-questions-and-living-into-the-answers/#comment-867 Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:15:10 +0000 http://natebettger.com/2009/06/22/protecting-the-questions-and-living-into-the-answers/#comment-867 Oooh. LOVE the quote!

I love the ideas here about protecting the question and I want to believe that you are right when you say, “we must know that it is here, in the questions, that we can truly and always unite.” But I can’t help thinking of my own awful experiences where my passion for the questions was in fact the very dividing point between myself and dear friends. They want to (without realizing it themselves) be sequestered into a group that thinks and believes just like them because they do truly believe they have the only right answer…which demonstrates your point well. But if I ever want to be united with these friends, I have to stop caring about the questions and pretend I agree with their silly questionless answers, pretend I don’t see all the other unanswered questions. So I don’t see any way the questions can ever unite us…unless of course, they change their way of thinking about the value of the questions, and doesn’t that create the same problem of one of us being right and one of us being wrong and the “other” person needing to change…which is as you say, a devisive way to be…

What I actually think is that in most places, a half-seeing tolerance is the closest thing we’ll get to unity, which is not very inspiring, of course. I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving the questions or readily connecting with others who are like me in that, but I do think to truly honor and love those who are not like me, I need to be able to respect and accept the fact that their hearts just don’t love my questions…can’t even tolerate them really.

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