In a recent conversation on a religious forum, a participant expressed his opinion that I’m too focused on the mind and on facts, and not enough on other factors. Here’s my reply.
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In your summation, you wrote (emphasis added):
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul and all your strength. Your writings suggest that you have the mind part down. Your passion suggests that you do understand the heart, soul and strength part at some level. Your words, however, indicate that your experiences with the irrationality of this world have you focused on facts.
Let me begin by introducing the idea that is ROUGHLY illustrated in the image below. Contemporary religion MAJORS is several different components and MINORS in the reflective and algorithmic minds, in logic, and fact. It is against the backdrop of this inordinate distribution of awareness and effort in popular religion that my viewpoint is constructed.
Simply because I talk about fact or logic or mind more than most, I will naturally be seen as having something out of order—something overemphasized or even fixated upon. But I submit that orthodox Christianity today far UNDERemphasizes these things when compared to what is said about and what can be deduced about their value in the Bible writings.
I’ve been meaning to write an essay on this lately and simply haven’t gotten around to it yet. Sorry, for that piece would be quite convenient to this present discussion.
So in the short term, I’m stopping here at least to say that just because it may SEEM that I have in inordinate interest in these things, a fuller analysis might yield quite a different view. Indeed, I know of NO church that honestly addresses the importance of the mind, of fact, and of logic. None. None of them hold the passages that promote such things in nearly as high a regard as they hold other passages. This is a sure demonstration that some bias is in play. And as with most biases, people are generally unaware of their own.
Your post generally upholds the worth of emotions, and seems to suggest that I’m too light on the emphasis thereof. From my own study of psychology, I’m fairly convinced that our emotions generally form as the result of the activities in our conscious minds—from the reasoning we do and from what we “tell ourselves”. They also form from our experiences….whether we suffer pain or discomfort from some situation, or whether the outcome was generally a positive one. But even in these cases, we can reprogram our emotions with deliberate conscious thought. For example, we look back on a period of grueling and painful physical workouts and yet we see it as a good and valuable time because of the new goals we reached, even though it hurt physically. Having done this, the next time we drive by the gym, we don’t feel emotional trepidation, but a sense of excitement instead.
You yourself have listed several anecdotes that demonstrate how mindless many are in the practice of their religion. I’ll use this evidence to further my position. It’s very likely that each of these folks FEELS good (emotionally) about the opinions or wishes he or she expressed. Yet those opinions or wishes do not jibe with reality. Hence, the irrationality we have been discussing.
So much emotion is programmed from the cognitive activities in the aware mind. Whether the programming is good or bad is all up to the quality of the thinking that caused it. It makes no sense, therefore, to trot out the emotional RESULTS as if they themselves have some fundamental value in discerning the reality of the world around us. They are not primary witnesses to any fact or to any reality. Rather, they are merely hearsayers, repeating what they have heard in the active mind—whether the conclusions were sound or not. It’s a classic example of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
So if Jack teaches a lesson on the Judge Not Fallacies to a crowd that has “always heard” that Jesus’ directive can be summed up in just the first two words: “Judge not.”—then it’s quite natural that an audience in a Judge Not church would FEEL uneasy about the lesson. It would not matter how well-documented and non-biased the lesson was. It would not matter that every single one of their traditional teachings on the subject could be soundly refuted with (biblical) fact, logic, and sourcing. They would STILL have averse emotions on the subject because it is different from the “mindware” they are currently running.
They would err if they took their feelings to be some sort of witness from God or from the Holy Spirit on the subject. The way God built the human mind to work is quite enough reason for someone to feel the cognitive dissonance that arises between an inaccurate understanding and an accurate teaching to the contrary. But confirmation bias, as popular a way of life as that is, entices people to pass off the poorly-programmed emotion as a sign from God that the new teaching (however sound it may be) MUST be wrong. Hence, the stupefying power of the church’s stubborn inertia. They rarely change a thing—even the problems within their own institutions that they recognize and complain about themselves!
Most of church, in my observation, is a practice in coping with the cognitive dissonance that naturally arises when those who are operating within church tradition read the Bible and glean from it ideas that are contrary to the going beliefs and practices. They are told to “trust” and to “feel” God’s presence and to ignore certain things and not to “put their faith in men” and not to “rely on their own understanding”. The bait and switch here, however, is that they are being counseled instead to rely on SOMEONE ELSE’S understanding! It is an exercise in illogic and in the resultant dysfunction.
Though there is debate among cognitive scientists, I favor the tripartite model of the mind: Autonomous, Algorithmic, Reflective. (Many leave out the Reflective Mind.) Regardless of its existence, however, I’d like to say something about the relationship between the Autonomous (unconscious) and the Algorithmic (conscious) minds. One can no more separate the two than he can to separate the top of an iceberg (the part above water) from the bottom of it. They go together as two inseparable and interdependent parts.
When people want to make certain assertions, therefore, about Jesus’ “heart, mind, soul, and strength” statement, I get leery pretty fast. What EXACTLY did Jesus have in mind when he said this? We don’t know because he did not say. But someone will want to trot this out and tell me that I ought not pay so much attention to the “mind” if I do not also write profusely about the heart, soul, and strength. But that’s like criticizing the doctor who counsels you to eat more citrus because of your Vitamin C deficiency, without saying anything to remind you to keep on eating proteins and other vital nutrients.
I focus on the facts for two main reasons:
- It is impossible to (honestly) separate real faith from fact. Abraham went because it was a FACT that God said “go”. He did not imagine or wish it; he heard it. False faith imagines what it wishes and calls the pursuit of the wish “faith”.
- Modern Christianity is observably careless about facts, getting a great many of them wrong and doing little or nothing to set things straight.
Look at Calvin, for instance, and what a mess has been made from his errors of fact. The answer to Calvin is not to sit around FEELING things, or having more “heart” or more “strength” somehow. No, the way to answer Calvin is to assemble and to argue the FACTS of the matter.
It’s quite possible that what people see as some deficit of “heart” in my case is exactly the opposite. Not knowing exactly what Jesus meant by “heart”, because he didn’t tell us exactly what he meant, I’m left to wonder. Perhaps it’s not a bad definition of “heart” if we consider it to be that part of a man that CARES about things and works toward them. (This is what the Reflective Mind does, by the way.) And here’s the irony: I really CARE about and work very hard toward getting the facts straight—the very facts that are written into the very Bible that so many laud as the “word of God”, and yet do not even strive to understand so much of what it says.
Jesus appears to have CARED about the scriptures (as well as other things) more than most. He was lauded for this by God and worshiped by some humans for the deeds he did as a result of this caring, this concern, this “heart”. And yet others crucified him for caring too much about things they would rather see neglected.
So to sum it up, I’m in favor of ALL the scriptures being known and understood. I’m in favor of ALL of righteousness being practiced. Yet most of Christianity today doesn’t care to look into all this. So I’m not surprised if my values seem inordinate, merely because they are so unconventional. But I’m getting them right out of the Bible. And I know of no passage that commands me to have more emotion or to shun cognitive activities.
So what am I missing here? Or have my thoughts here changed your view on this topic?
Jack
