If their immediate reaction is “no, it’s not a good thing, it does nothing but kill people,” this is better than the first reaction, but still, it’s not fully listening, it’s passing immediate judgment.

Real listening means that when somebody says something you don’t agree with, you ask them questions about it. You hold their viewpoint to be just as valid as your own; they are a human being just like you, and they are not lower or higher than you. So the good listener who happens not to think that suicide bombing is good asks something like, “what do you think it’s good for?” to get a sense of why the person is saying what they say. After you ask four or five such questions like this, you might find an answer that makes more sense than you thought, even though you might personally disagree with it still.

Then you no longer fear the unknowns about how the suicide bombing advocate thinks; you know his/her psychology around the issue, which better equips you to relate to/deal with him/her, whether you choose to be friends or not. If the other person cannot listen with this kind of an open mind, set some limits to what you trust them with. Someone who cannot just listen, cannot be trusted with what you tell them, because at any given point you may lose the chance to correct a misunderstanding and own your own words due to a dogmatic, judgmental shutdown.

Even a little sign of a “shutdown” is a signal. For example, there is somebody I used to work with who liked me very much. One day, I was buying my lunch at the cafeteria. I was about to pay for the food, when she jumped up and stuck her hand out with a $5 bill in it to pay for my lunch–without asking me first. I calmly told her it was all right, I would pay for my lunch, but she continued to push and ended up paying for me. As well-meaning a gesture as this was on her part, it actually was an example of not respecting my boundaries, given her ignorance of my quiet objections to her paying for my lunch. That event alone showed me that, as much as I liked her, trusting her beyond a certain point would not be an appropriate way to share love with her, unfortunately, because I couldn’t count on her listening to me if I need that.