Understanding Opinions

In class we discussed the idea of "the person who has spoken and heard all opinions has more right to hold their opinion."

My dad and I often discuss politics, and recently we discussed the West Borough Baptist Church being sued. WBC is the group that protests soliders funerals, along with LGBT events - insisting that God is damning the United States and the world to hell because of its tolerance of homosexuality. My claim to this argument was always, "who cares what they think, they are stupid." Now, in class Dr. Layne brought up the idea that you cannot argue someone by condemning them, but rather in order to truly argue you must understand them. This idea was interesting to me, while I still despise WBC, I have realized that so many people are infuriated over what they do, simply because the WBC themselves do not show much of an understanding.

Over all, I realized that in order to argue any argument, you cannot merely blow off the opposing party because you believe that your views are right, but you rather must understand where they are coming from to properly argue against them.