Talk:Beliefs
Proposed change
Last night at the Horsham meeting, we agreed to proposed a change to our beliefs:
- When working towards a goal, people check to see that their actions are having the desired effect.
would be changed to
- When working towards a goal, people question whether their actions are having the desired effect.
The rationale for this change, as I understand it, was that there are some types of goals where it can be difficult or impossible to check for results. Also, we thought that "question" had a connotation that we wanted, more than "check", because "question" seems more to connote a wider range of analyses, including types of reflection that may be harder to quantify, whereas "check" seems to connote more a concrete or easily quantifiable check.
This change will become official after 8 days if there are no objections.Cazort (talk) 10:47, 24 December 2013 (EST)
Archived discussions
Proposed change
Tonight at the Horsham meeting, we proposed a change to our belief:
- People take responsibility for their actions, and do not take responsibility for outcomes beyond their control.
We proposed to remove the second clause entirely, and just say:
- People take responsibility for their actions.
We had multiple reasons why we weren't satisfied with the second part of the belief. For one thing, we thought that people taking responsibility for outcomes can still be interpreted as people taking on the consequences of an outcome. For another thing, we thought that whether or not someone has control over something is not clear-cut, and something being beyond someone's control may be different from someone not having control over something. For instance, people can have some amount of influence in many situations, and saying "outcomes beyond their control" here doesn't necessarily exclude situations where people take responsibility by means of manipulating or coercing others.
One of the main reasons why we had this part of the belief in the first place was to address the idea that it is unhealthy to take responsibility for someone else's emotions. To address this, we have proposed a new practice.
This change will become official after 8 days if there are no objections. Sylvia 20:53, 1 April 2013 (CDT)
- This change has become official! Sylvia 09:46, 9 April 2013 (CDT)
Proposed change
Tonight at the West Philly meeting, we agreed to change this point from the healthy state section:
- People take responsibility for their actions, and do not take responsibility for things beyond their control.
would be changed to:
- People take responsibility for their actions, and do not take responsibility for outcomes beyond their control.
Sylvia had objected to the second half of this statement, on the grounds that she did not necessarily consider it unhealthy for people to take on responsibilities associated with dealing with situations that arose due to things beyond their control. I agree with this interpretation.
We proposed to change "things" to "outcomes" to make it more specific, in that what we consider unhealthy is when a person is holding themselves responsible for a specific outcome that they don't control, but that it's not necessarily unhealthy if they take responsibilities associated with fixing a situation that arose for situations beyond their control--because in this case the long-term outcomes would be more within their control. This more specific wording, with "outcomes", also addresses all the scenarios that I could think up in which I would consider it unhealthy for people to take responsibility.
This change will become official if there are no objections after 8 days. Cazort 18:44, 21 March 2013 (CDT)
- This change has become official! Sylvia 10:43, 29 March 2013 (CDT)
(Objected) Proposed change
Tonight at the Horsham meeting, we agreed to change this point from the healthy state section:
- People take responsibility for their actions, and do not take responsibility for things beyond their control.
to:
- People take responsibility for their actions, and are not held responsible for things beyond their control.
This change is in response to the idea that responsibility can mean different things, and one meaning is to take care of the consequences of something, which we don't believe is always unhealthy for someone to do in response to something that they had no control over. The other meaning we discussed was harder for us to articulate, but it has to do with acknowledging that someone has done something.
This change will become official in 8 days, if there are no objections. Sylvia 20:15, 18 March 2013 (CDT)
- I've been thinking more about this. I think I'd like to replace the second part with a separate point that says, "People acknowledge when a circumstance is beyond their control, or when a circumstance is beyond someone else's control." Roseapprentice 07:00, 19 March 2013 (CDT)
- I've been thinking about it more too, and I feel like that's more along the lines of what I want it to say, because this phrasing doesn't say anything about the idea of people taking responsibility for other people's feelings, and it also excludes the idea of someone being held responsible for something that they have agreed to be held responsible for. Sylvia 11:43, 19 March 2013 (CDT)
- I'd like to discuss this more because I think people can have varying degrees of control over a situation, in some cases very little, and I think the idea that I was trying to get at when we originally wrote this point was that at a certain point it becomes unreasonable or inefficient for one person to take on the consequences of an entire situation just because they had some part in the cause of it, especially if the person was acting reasonably and respectfully in the first place - such as when someone tries to be respectful, and someone's feelings get hurt as a result. I think that's different from the idea of someone voluntarily taking care of the consequences of some action that they may or may not have had a part in. And in many cases, people have some control over other people's feelings, but I wouldn't say that means they're responsible for the feelings of others. I think our previous point addressed that issue more. I'd like to mildly object to this change because I think it would be better to wait until we have something better. If people disagree with me I'll retract my objection. Sylvia 14:08, 19 March 2013 (CDT)
Proposed addition to beliefs: healthy state
Tonight at the West Philly meeting we agreed to add the following point:
- People view and treat each other as whole people.
directly after "People treat each other with respect." and before "People respond to their emotions in empowering and constructive ways." This addition corresponds with a proposed removal of "See and..." from the rules of communication, due to this part being unenforceable as a rule without in turn breaking the rule about not making a statement about someone's thoughts. While we saw problems with this as a rule, we agreed that it was still an important concept or principle, and we agreed to put it in the health state section.
This addition will become official after 8 days if there are no objections. Cazort 22:18, 21 February 2013 (CST)
- This change has become official. Sylvia 10:44, 1 March 2013 (CST)
Change to beliefs
Tonight at the Horsham meeting we agreed on the following change:
- We support punishment only for the purpose of preventing harmful actions. We do not support punishment for the purpose of inflicting pain and suffering.
would be changed to:
- If we support punishment, we do so only for the purpose of preventing harmful actions. We do not support punishment for the purpose of inflicting pain and suffering.
This change reflects the new consensus of our group. Dewey Odhner, at the meeting, said that he did not necessarily support punishment at all, so we wanted to reword the statement so that it did not imply that all participants in the group supported punishment.
We also proposed to move this out of the beliefs and into the practices, because it seems to be more a practice than a core belief.
These changes will become official after 8 days if there are no objections. Cazort 21:18, 11 February 2013 (CST)
- This change has become official. Sylvia 17:46, 19 February 2013 (CST)
Change to beliefs
Tonight at the West Philly meeting we agreed on the following change to our beliefs. In the healthy state section, the following bullet point:
- People's emotions are empowering (flowing into or motivating constructive actions).
would be changed to
- People's emotions flow into or motivate constructive actions.
The rationale for this was an objection Sylvia initially brought up, which was that, the way this is worded, it could reasonably be read or interpreted to mean that something about the emotions themselves is inherently empowering or flowing into constructive actions. This is not the original intention we had behind this belief--the interpretation that we've been working with from the beginning of including this belief, was the idea that feelings are not inherently good or bad, but rather, that how a person acts in the end is what matters. This new wording may not be perfect but I think it diminishes the possibility of identifying emotions as being inherently good or bad, which is something we have had a consensus that we want to avoid, for some time in our group. I think this new wording is both better overall, and is more likely to be interpreted by newcomers or outsiders to our group in the way in which we intend this belief to be interpreted. Cazort 22:28, 13 December 2012 (CST)
Last night at the Horsham meeting we discussed this belief further, and although there was a consensus to replace the old belief with the new belief above, we also had a consensus to replace either of these beliefs with this one:
- People respond to their emotions in empowering and constructive ways.
We agreed that this wording goes farther in the direction of what we had intended, describing how people respond to emotions rather than the emotions themselves. This belief will become official (replacing whichever of the two beliefs above are currently official) after 8 days. Cazort 08:19, 18 December 2012 (CST)
- These have become official! Cazort 12:12, 31 December 2012 (CST)
