My daughters’ kindergarten teachers once pulled me and their dad aside at afterschool pickup time to have The Talk with us about our daughters’ behavior at school.
What was the crime for which my daughters, their dad, and I got reprimanded? My daughters had been telling the other kindergarteners that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
The other children who did believe in Santa Claus naturally got extremely upset by this news—and their parents got extremely upset by it, too. The parents wanted the teachers to tell us to tell our daughters to stop this behavior. My children were raised Jewish, so these other parents wanted my daughters to keep this information to themselves to preserve the illusion.
These other parents called it preserving, “The Magic.”
We had a lengthy discussion with these teachers in which I refused to instruct my daughters to do anything of the kind. I stated categorically that I was proud of my daughters for standing up for their convictions and having the courage to challenge others in theirs.
I stated that, if my daughters were out there telling people that Santa Claus isn't real, then more power to them. I stated that the issue when much further than merely believing a Christmas fairy tale. It strikes at the very heart of truth.
Your opinion means nothing. No one in the world is under any obligation to accept your opinion on any subject whatsoever just because you stated your opinion out loud.
Opinion is the lowest and weakest form of intellectual rigor.
If you believe that Santa Claus exists, you better be ready to back it up with facts and evidence. No one will nor should they take your word for it.
If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God or that God exists or even that science is the only real truth—whatever it is you believe—you better pack a lunch and bring all your arguments, logic, examples, and demonstrable, repeatable data to support your claim. Your opinion doesn’t fall into any of those categories.
If you believe there are only two genders or that there are twenty-two genders or if you believe that there are unlimited genders—no matter what you believe—the burden of proof is on you to convince people using the power of your evidence, logic, and critical thinking skills.
There is no one alive on Planet Earth who is under any obligation to believe as you believe just because you opened your mouth and a certain combination of sounds came out.
Your opinion means nothing if you can’t back it up and actually convince people to change their views.
We have a problem in the world today. We all seem to think that those who believe differently are committing some sort of crime and might actually deserve to be taken out and shot simply because they believe differently.
We think this and even say it in the media when none of us even takes the time to think about why WE believe as we do. If you really believe something, you should be able to explain why. You should be able to point to the logic and evidence that convinced you to believe that. You should be able to repeat these arguments to others to show them why they should believe as you do.
It doesn’t work to simply write these people off by saying they’re stupid or evil or just lost. The burden is on you to convince them using language they can understand. You can’t use the language of your own belief to convince someone to believe something they already don’t believe. That doesn’t work. You have to use their language to convince them.
If you really believe what you say you believe, you should care enough about the other person to want to show them a better way. You wouldn’t be so quick to write them off and consign them to the ash heap of eternity for the crime of believing something you disagree with.
If your opinion has any validity at all, if your opinion is worth enough for anyone to respect it even for a second, then the other person’s opinion is just as important as yours. You are the one who is under an obligation to take their opinion into account and consider the possibility that they could be right and you are the one who is lost, ignorant, or just misinformed—which, let’s be honest, is a very real possibility.
I made these arguments to my daughters’ kindergarten teachers and I told them that I wasn’t in the habit of lying to my children about the nature of reality. I wasn’t about to start lying to them just so some other parents could lie to their children about it. If some parent does want to lie to their children and tell them Santa Claus exists when the parents know for a fact that he doesn’t, then that’s the other parent’s decision. I’m not going to take responsibility for the outcome.
When I said this, one of the teachers got tears in her eyes. She admitted that her sixteen-year-old son still had not forgiven her for lying to him about Santa Claus.
Lying to our loved ones about something we know to be untrue has massive, long-term consequences we may or may not have considered. We all might want to think about that when we choose which beliefs we teach our children.
Whatever beliefs we teach our children, our children need to be prepared to go out into the world and meet people who believe differently. Our children need to be prepared to defend their beliefs—not with torches and pitchforks and lynch mobs—but with logical arguments, hard evidence, and real-world, repeatable examples that prove the truth of what they’re saying.
Our children need to understand that no one has any reason to protect your feelings just because they’re yours. We all have feelings. We all have opinions. We all have deeply held convictions and beliefs.
Your feelings, opinions, and convictions are no more valid than the next person’s. You are under just as great an obligation to consider and protect the other person’s feelings and beliefs as they are to protect yours.
If you think you have the right to go out into the world and challenge other people’s beliefs and opinions, you better be ready for the other person to do the same thing back to you.
You might discover that their logic, evidence, and arguments are actually far more robust than yours. Your logic, evidence, and arguments might crumble before theirs and you might be forced to change your position.
This is how we arrive at the truth. We don’t arrive at the truth by getting up a lynch mob every time we discover that someone believes differently than we do.
Attacking another person’s beliefs in this way actually blocks us from arriving at the truth. It prevents us from hearing the evidence that might convince us that what the other person believes is actually true and we are the ones who have been living a delusion.
None of us wants to live a lie—and yet that’s exactly what we are doing when we refuse to listen and actually take the time to communicate the reasons behind our beliefs to others. Stomping your foot and throwing a tantrum because someone hurt your feelings is not the way to convince someone that you’re right. It actually makes you look even weaker than you already are.
That behavior on its own is proof that your position is fragile and you don’t have the logic, evidence, and arguments to support your view. You’re announcing to the world that you already know your position is indefensible. This is the quickest way to convince people that your view is wrong. No one would want to sign up for an indefensible position and that’s exactly what you’re asking them to do.
Your opinion means nothing. You need to bring something a lot stronger than that or pack up and go home.
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