Not every true thing is conveniently obvious. And even so, large numbers of people may well operate on the assumption that all true things are—or should be—obvious. It is a common overestimation of human capability, often based on the assumption that what can be detected should be detectable without effort—and more particularly, detectable by our natural human senses.
Here are a few ways it happens:
Continue reading “If That Were True, I Would See It”
Your amazing self can notice a thing in this world and:
Meanwhile, your same amazing self can also:
The same mind can treat one matter with high honesty, rationality, and responsibility, and another quite differently! It’s somewhat like the way we might treat the various people who come to our houses or call us on the phone—some being welcome (and for different reasons), and some being not welcome at all.
But have you ever assumed the worst about a visitor or caller, only to discover later that they had value to you after all? That’s the amazing thing about us that I wanted to point out in this post. We can really get some things right, but we are amazingly capable of misjudging things, too. And it seems to be quite up to us—how careful we are with how we judge things.
The more I think about it, the more impressed I am with how much power we were given over our own lives. And it’s quite analogous to the power of the automobile, which we’d much rather see in the hands of a mature, kind, sober and responsible person than in the hands of someone else!
So much of the outcome seems to be based on the quality of the judgments we make about things!
For the record, I am so not an atheist nor a cynic! What I am is a guy who’s got the guts to tackle some of the hard topics of Christianity, with a view toward working them out faithfully, honestly, rationally, and responsibly!
Some are exuberant in declaring the “power of prayer”, but I think that the topic is famously oversimplified. So I wanted to make a short post pointing out the two main problems I see with this popular view:
Continue reading Two Problems with “The Power of Prayer”I’m pondering this meme I found on Facebook:
This thought is not ready for publication. It’s sloppy, and has some flaws that weaken its impact considerably. Let me make some general observations first, and then we’ll look at the stumbling blocks here.
The human brain is designed to notice things and to make sense of them in various ways. One of those ways is that we can notice similarities between things—even if the things we are comparing could also be contrasted in various ways. And we can describe one thing in terms of something else. That’s what the meme attempts to do—to describe the value of being “launched” into great things by way a description of the bow and arrow.
All three of the meme’s sentences, then, are messy. The intent is to encourage, but it’s fairly obvious that the author hasn’t thought it through. And so, likely, with the reader who would share it with others. And this is how it goes in our cognitive-miser culture, where we often deal in fuzzy ideas without ever sitting down to sort them out properly to see whether they’re really good ideas or not.
I see problematic memes every day, and often, there’s a single point that needs attention. This one is worse, and it struck me as a fine example of someone having the barre set pretty low for their thinking, while still having the desire to share those thoughts with others.
It can take quite some time to learn how to work the Bible puzzle—and for many of us, one of the first steps seems to be coming to the realization that it is, indeed, a puzzle at all! I remember taking offense when I heard a certain author call it that sometime in the early 2000s. My view of it at the time went something like this:
Quite obviously, when you limit the field length for the incoming message, you are excluding messages that will not fit in the prescribed space. This means you’re probably assuming
that any good message would fit in the box and any that won’t fit must be bad.
But this is all kinds of wrong.
Surely, God himself could tell you more good things than would fit in your little box. And you could argue that, for obvious reasons, you aren’t expecting God to be submitting an answer. But it seems you aren’t expecting that anyone else could have any wisdom that might exceed the limits of your box.
Continue reading Predetermined Non-ListeningI just heard a particularly mindless quote on Christian radio. It went something like this (best I remember):
Continue reading “The Point of Christianity”“The point of Christianity is neither in self-improvement nor gaining knowledge, but in Christ-likeness.”
Source Forgotten
The statistician will collect and publish statistics about how people are, and the rest of the world tends to take those stats as rules. And in doing so, they often draw some bad conclusions. For instance, when some certain ailments show up a lot in the elderly, it’s easy to assume that the ailment happens because they are elderly, rather than because they’ve been doing some certain bad habit long enough for it to start showing up in disease. We see alarming rates of disease, so we jump to conclusions about the causes, without ever stopping to give due consideration to the question, “Why aren’t all the elderly suffering from this disease?”
Continue reading Statistics Aren’t the Same as Rules