To change your mind is human

So one Senator changes his mind about same-sex marriage. My first reaction is to say that a true believer turned into human being when someone he knew and cared about told him what it was like to be gay.

Except that it is extremely human to believe things. In a world that is extraordinarily complex, all of us make our way in it by simplifying it into generalizations and organizing concepts. Religion is only one way of reducing this world to a relatively few ideals and rules to live by. And if we are not members of an organized faith system, then we have picked and chosen or slid into a collection of beliefs that works for us.

Among other worldviews, I like empiricism for the way it tries to closely tie actual experience to concepts but I still don’t escape large and small leaps that are essentially speculative.

And so I favor the way the Senator’s experience falls into my somewhat haphazard system of beliefs based on a mix of experience and reason and imagination. When he, with his principles, was forced to confront a bit of that complex world in the fact of a gay son, he changed his mind.

But he might not have done so. That too would have been an entirely human reaction.

And so we all move along with our lives.

Opening ourselves to the realities of our existence is for me a more faithful way to live, but in my experience, this approach leaves you with fewer comprehensive beliefs that you’re sure of.

I’m personally fairly confident that changing his mind was a good thing for the Senator to do. Of course, there were also times when I changed my mind - but not all of it or all at once. That’s a human way to live. But we don’t all do it the same way.

To be human is not always a compliment. But neither is it necessarily an insult. For now let’s call it a condition. Still, good choice, Senator, from one human to another.