Do religions have common ground?

The Washington Post had this forum topic this week:

THE QUESTION

If some religious people believe they have a monopoly on truth, then are conversation and common ground possible? If so, what would be the difficulties and benefits of such a conversation?

Posted by Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham on November 10, 2006 8:34 AM

I posted this comment:

This is a great question, but the answer may require a few years of preparation. We may find it helpful to learn how to carry on such conversations on less-loaded topics first.

For example, people have studied recent disasters at nuclear power plants, space shuttles, airplane accidents, etc., to see how on earth these things happen, despite our best efforts to make them safe. The answers reveal a lot about how humans form beliefs, carry on conversations, and change beliefs. The stakes keep getting higher.

The keys to what's called "high reliability organizations" are honesty, trust, and ability to speak out respectfully and safely when you see something that doesn't seem to fit the story that everyone is treating as truth. And that means sometimes not only questioning the fact, but also questioning the framework or model or story-line.

The costs of mistakes keep getting higher, so this is a type of social learning that gets more important with time. This kind of problem occurs at home, at work, and at a national and cultural level.

It's hard, but not impossible, to build such a "safety culture" on purpose. All high-risk businesses are working on that problem, including nuclear power plants, airlines, hospitals.. It's made doubly-hard because we tangle up questioning facts, questioning assumptions, and challenging-authority or "stepping out of line." So, those who raise honest questions in a loving way are often perceived as opponents or enemies.

Some people still assert that dissent and open questioning are not compatible with the necessary authority and control to maintain law, order, and public safety. The facts disagree. In aircraft cockpits, co-pilots are learning how to challenge the pilot's facts without challenging her authority. In hospitals, nurses are learning how to challenge the surgeon's assumptions without being out of line. Even the US Army has a program of learning how those on "the bottom" can question the facts and assumptions of those above them without being insubordinate. If these questions can't be raised, overall safety goes down, not up, and that's been demonstrated over and over.

And, particularly, the hardest thing to do is to challenge unspoken, shared assumptions.

But, until we learn how to carry on these conversations, about the "truth" of much simpler things such as what's going on inside the reactor, or on that left wing, or inside the patient, or in the middle east, it seems doubly hard to talk about differing assumptions regarding religious questions.

So it's a really good sign that people are learning how to carry on serious conversations, and that a lot of funding is going into that activity. Those skills should help give us the experience and skills we need to tackle even harder questions about apparent discrepancies between religions, and between religion and science.

On the other hand, if we can't even carry on productive conversations about relatively simple matters, we shouldn't be surprised that the harder ones defy us.

November 19, 2006 6:39 AM

References
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Threat and Error Management - Airline safety that also works for hospitals

Organizational Learning From Experience in High-Hazard Industries (Carroll, 2002, MIT)

Health care risk analysis and Culture of Safety (IOM)

US Army Leadership Field Manual ( FM 22-100 )

High Reliability Organizations (Web site with extensive bibliography)

Effects of adaptive behaviors and shared mental models on control crew performance.