Jack Pelham

After decades of Bible study, I’m convinced that we tend to get lots of things wrong about the Bible for failure to fully decouple from our own ways of thinking and communicating so as to fully grasp the ways of the Bible writers and of those they were sometimes quoting. I want to make a brief argument here in favor of the decoupling skills we Bible students should learn, but first I hope you’ll indulge me while I set the stage with a short and necessary introduction to what we tend to be like as humans.

INTRODUCTION: SELF-FOCUSED, NOW-FOCUSED, AND OFTEN DISSATISFIED

By nature, it’s quite easy for humans to be self-focused and even self-absorbed—to concern ourselves only with our own interests and habits, and to guard ourselves against external considerations. Yet even so, we do well to notice that our lives have been set into a world in which there are billions of other people already here when we get here. Apparently, this world is not all about the individual—or, to put it more personally, it’s not all about me. Yes, there’s more to this world than just me—whether I’m the sort to appreciate that fact or not. Some people discover this fact and make more of it than do others.

It’s also not all about now. We may from time to time become fixated on the present day, but there have been some millions of days up until now, and the events of some of them are recorded in writing. And then there’s the question of the future, and of trends, and of prophecies and such. We were born onto a timeline. And again, some people discover this and make more if it than do others who seem content to ignore the past or the future or both, more or less.

And so we can observe that some tend to shut themselves off somewhat from what is not-oneself and from what is not-now. But when we read what someone else wrote—or when we listen to someone else talk—we are, at least a little bit, opening ourselves up to the possibility of being influenced by something beyond ourselves. We are, at least a little bit, exploring beyond the boundaries of our own internal thoughts, dispositions, attitudes, and beliefs. And similarly, if we read someone from the past, we are, at least a little bit, exploring beyond our own time into another era. But even so, when we dare to do this, most of us still seem to have at least a slight preference to stay somewhat near “home” in such explorations, and grow uncomfortable when venturing too far afield into subjects and ways of thinking with which we are unfamiliar. Perhaps it’s from fear, or from lack of care, or perhaps the motive is as mundane as the mere desire to avoid the mental work of processing unfamiliar things.

We also tend to stay near “home” when it comes to the sort of language we read or listen to. If it’s archaic or foreign, it becomes inconvenient for us, and we’re often not apt to assume that the value of understanding it is worth the trouble it takes to understand it (correctly). We can also do this with writings—and even modern writings— that are filled with metaphors, for this requires more mental exertion from us, so as to interpret the metaphors accurately. (And this may tend to explain why poetry is not more popular than it is.)

For all these considerations (and probably more), it’s simply easier for us to stay nearer to what we’re used to when it comes to what we listen to and what we read. But here’s an important observation: At the same time we’re consistently inclined to stay close to home in our cognitive lives, many of us find ourselves wishing for more from life—wishing for something more fulfilling or intriguing—more satisfying. Ironically, we may wish for a life different from our own in some way, yet our habit is to read and listen only to things that are pretty much like we are already. Think about that. We may well finding ourselves wishing for change without having to do much work to discover what that change should be, or how to bring it about.

Now, it doesn’t take much mental examination to see that there’s a problem with such a lazy notion, because in this real world into which our lives were set at birth, life takes work. You can call me crazy here if you must, but I say that if one is dissatisfied with one’s situation in life, that situation is more likely to improved by one’s own efforts than by the occurrence of some fortunate and unforeseen event in which someone else comes and changes our lives for us. Even if someone else gives us the right ideas about what changes we might make to our lives, it so often works out that it is we ourselves who must do the work of making those changes happen. And I’ll argue at length that we must often do the work required even to understand those ideas of others in the first place. Life takes work—and for as long as humans have existed, people have been looking for ways to cheat that fact. And what easier way to cheat it than avoiding mental work?

IN SEARCH OF IDEAS

Wouldn’t it be something, though, if the better life for which we long were actually attainable? What if we could actually find some life-changing ideas coming from other people—or even from people in the past? Suppose we could find a way to increase our understanding substantially and to have a more abundant life than what most are used to in our culture! Well, many believe, as I do, that God revealed things of this sort through special people in ages past—and that these things can generally be found in the Bible. Yet at the same time, in my judgment, many who are looking to the Bible for answers are not walking away with many life-changing ideas that lead to substantial improvements in their lives. They keep at it because it seems the faithful thing to do, but it’s not bearing the fruit they expect it to bear.

And while there may be several factors contributing to this, I want to present one ironic cause here for your consideration: Sometimes we fail to grasp good ideas we read—the ideas we need to improve our lives—not because we are entirely disinterested in improving our situation, but because we fail to decouple from our our own habitual thinking well enough to understand just how different those better ideas really are from our own mental routines. We may read the words, but we don’t process them well enough to realize the difference between what they mean and what we habitually think. Even though we’re reading, we’re not decoupling from our own internal view well enough to be able to think the thoughts of the one we’re reading. Yes, we’re reading someone else—and that’s good—but we’re not really listening; we’re not really letting their ideas into our own mind, where we can set them on the table and look them over really well.

There can be different reasons for this. One is that, even though we’re willing to read, we’re still not really open to changing our thoughts should better thoughts be revealed in the writing. Perhaps this comes from pride, or from fear, or merely from the strength of habit. Or perhaps it comes from some other cause that doesn’t come to my mind in this moment.

But there’s another consideration—a very practical one—that prompted this post. It’s that we sometimes fail to think the writer’s thoughts—or the thoughts of the one the writer is quoting— because we have failed to decouple from our own habits of communicating ideas in order to understand their habits of communicating. This is a practical concern, and yet it can cause as much trouble as would some deeper matter of having a bad attitude. In other words, while we might sometimes fail to understand because we don’t want to understand, on other occasions, we might fail to understand because we don’t know how. It could be that the writer or speaker is using a manner of speech unlike our own, and that we fail to understand how that manner of speech works.

We might have to learn about their times, where we really only know and habitually care about our own time. We might have to understand their metaphors and figures of speech first before we can manage to think the thoughts they were thinking. And the more of their writings that we want to understand, the further afield we must go in our own learning—the broader must be the scope of our pondering—the more we must imagine the possibilities of what they might have meant to convey. Indeed, if someone from a couple thousand years in the future were to read your social media posts, don’t you think you’d have to explain a lot of things to them so that they could know how to think like you’re thinking? Would you really expect them to know what you meant had you posted something like, “The Rock is such a star!” And so, we ourselves may well need help understanding communications from those from different cultures and in different eras.

THE TRAGIC MISTAKE

You can go to almost any church these days and hear the general idea that the Bible is a very important book. So you can venture to read the Bible faithfully, as many do—whether much or little. But just because you’re reading it, this doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily decoupling from your own way of thinking in order to grasp the thinking of the various Bible authors. You might just be insisting on understanding it by use of your own way of thinking, and not of theirs. And this is a tragic mistake—made by millions, it seems—for you can end up thinking your own habitual thoughts while thinking you’re getting them “from the Bible”. Or, perhaps even worse, you can end up misinterpreting what the writers/speakers meant, and believing something that is neither what you already believed, nor what the writers/speakers believed! And how ironic is that—that we would go to the Bible for understanding, and come away with a misunderstanding, all while thinking we are now properly informed because we “got it from the Bible”?

Since I’ve touched on the subject, let me take a moment here to mention what I call “Interpretation Neglect”. It’s is a cognitive bias that discounts our own responsibility for the way we interpret things. Here’s a meme that describes it briefly.

Reading without decoupling from our own view is risky business because we can often walk away having failed to understand that we’re simply reading our own view into the text we’re considering, rather than walking away with an understanding of the text that its author or speaker would have agreed with.

SOME PRACTICALS

In the interests of practicality, I’d like to mention two particular decoupling failures that we should all find familiar. The first is the error of assuming oneself to be the audience, where the writer (or the one being quoted) was addressing people of a different time and situation. The skilled reader can decouple from a Bible writer’s or speaker’s “you”, and can understand that they were addressing someone other than readers that would come along a couple thousand years later. The skilled decoupler can say, “Let’s see what this author said to his audience,” rather than saying, “Let’s see what this author says to me.” He or she can say, “What can I learn from what was said to those people in that situation?”, rather than saying, “This was said to me!”

And why would this be an important skill to have? Well, if you assume it was all written to you, then you’re going to have to build an ark and a tabernacle and a temple and you’re going to have to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes upon you in power, and so forth. (These were all instructions given to various Bible characters throughout the story.) But if you can decouple from the self-centered view, you can realize that such things are not instructions to you personally, and you can avoid the consequences of such bad assumptions.

For the record, I am not suggesting that we should take the attitude that nothing in the Bible should be applicable for us, or should be understood to relate to our own lives. Rather, I’m suggesting that the Bible is not written directly to us and that we have to learn from it indirectly in many cases—which is mentally harder. We can read what they were told, but then we have to decide (however wisely or foolishly we may do it) what should be learned from that, and what we should do ourselves. And before I move on, let me point out that God knows this, and yet he delivered these Bible documents to our generation anyway. He knows it takes more mental work to learn indirectly like this, yet he apparently thinks we can handle the mental operations necessary to interpret these things wisely. Based on the nature of the scriptures that have been delivered to our generation, it would seem that God expects us to be the reflective sort who will pondering things at length and learn from them.

ONE MORE EXAMPLE

When I sat down to write this, I had in mind only a short piece, and not the new book that the world really could use on this subject (hermeneutics). So let me give just one more example of the need for decoupling as we consider the Bible texts. Consider the question: How many stars are there? Without stopping to research the matter, just take a stab and answering in your mind, based on the knowledge of the matter you already have. Are there millions? Billions? Trillions?

Many of us will field such a question assuming our modern scientific view of the universe, and when we hear “stars”, we automatically think about the things we see in the sky at night, and that our new telescopes are detailing for us more and more with each passing decade. Perhaps this is how you took this question yourself, assuming that “stars” was intended literally. And if this is how you took it, I want you to notice that I previously mentioned stars in this post, where almost certainly, you took it figuratively. The previous mention was this:

“The Rock is such a star!”

Here, you (probably) understood that “The Rock” is an actor, and that “star” is a metaphor for a brilliant or exceptional individual, particularly in the field of acting. And in our previous discussion, I was asking whether someone from a couple thousand years in the future would need help understanding such a sentence about a rock and a star. And if you’re like most, I’m betting you could easily see how they might need help to decouple from their habitual use of such words in order to grasp yours.

Suppose, however, that when I asked you “How many stars are there?”, I was talking not about literal stars, nor about movie stars, but about angels? In that case, I’d have been meaning, “How many angels are there?” And you might wonder, “Why would anybody talk that way, and say ‘stars’ when he means ‘angels’?” And that would be a fine question, the answer to which could simply be that it was their custom–not yours, but theirs—to do so. Do you see the need for decoupling here?

In the Bible documents, the writers and the people they were quoting would sometimes use “stars” to refer to angels. Here’s one obvious example of this:

Revelation 1:20 The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.

I’ll assert here simply that there are other Bible passages that use “stars” to refer to angel. Assuming I’m right about that, then the really important question is this: Just how many of the 60 or 70 “star” passages in the Bible are talking about angels?

A great many Bible readers have never once asked that question, and they are apt to read a star passage assuming it’s about literal stars unless something forces them to consider the alternatives. But there’s a pretty big difference between an author meaning literal stars and one meaning angels, right? So it’s actually quite important that we ask that question when we read those passages, but most don’t.

For example, most will assume that the “star” that led the wise men to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus was a literal star—or if not a star exactly, perhaps something roughly similar, such as a comet. They will never stop and consider the possibility that the Ancient Near Eastern writer was telling his Ancient Near Eastern audience about an angel guiding the wise men on their journey. And for the record, there are angels involved otherwise in the stories of Jesus’ birth, so it’s certainly reasonable to wonder whether this “star” was an angel, or whether it was meant literally. But many will never ask that question; they’ll never try to play out the text in their heads to figure out how it might have worked in each possible scenario. Rather, they will simply assume a scenario and run with it while they read.

How often, then, have we missed the point because of failing to decouple from our own assumptions and habits?

Indeed, how many have just assumed that the ancient authors/speakers must have been speaking literally when using phrases like “four corners of the earth” or “circle of the earth” for “ends of the earth”, without ever doing the work to figure out what they actually meant? And how many of us, consequently, have decided that the authors were scientifically ignorant, since we ourselves know better than what we are assuming they meant—that the earth is neither in the shape of a disc, nor in a shape that has corners or ends? It’s easy to assume that they were just ignorant, but what if they weren’t even attempting to write about scientific facts of geology, and you’re assuming they were because you yourself are a scientifically-minded person living in a scientifically-minded culture that is not very good at decoupling in order to understand people who didn’t think or communicate like us?

I’ve seen several moderns assure others that the ancients believed that the stars in the sky are, in fact, angels. This is their interpretation of the ancient writings, but I have never found a passage that includes actual information that leaves us no other reasonable choice but to interpret it the same way. To me, it seems more a customary assumption (that they believed that the stars are angels) than a thing that can be clearly demonstrated from the texts. So it’s an interpretive assumption on our part, and not a necessary inference from the texts. (If someone knows of a passage in any ancient document—biblical or extrabiblical—that demonstrates this on its own, without requiring that such assumption be brought to the text, please cite it for me!)

I’ve been in many conversations where I try to convince people of these kinds of decoupling errors, and the success of the conversations varies wildly from few people who eventually say, “Oh, I get it!” to those who will decide in response that Jack is an idiot, or a heretic, or even Satan himself! (Yes, really, there are some who have said such things to me.)

This sort of decoupling is a skill that God expects us to have. Though Jesus didn’t use the decoupling word here, this is exactly what he’s calling for when he counsels the Pharisees thus:

John 7:24 Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”

He’s telling them, in other words, to decouple from their initial view of a matter, and to look deeply enough at it to judge it correctly. Paul points out to the Corinthians that they were making a similar error in 2 Corinthians 10:7. And there are many other Bible examples in which what the people were already thinking was not sufficient, and needed correction.

In fact, one fairly major theme that can be tracked through the Bible story is that of the need for the individual to give up what is his own so that he can have what is God’s. Here’s one of the starkest declarations of this idea, and it startles many to find it in their Bibles:

Luke 14:33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.

What he’s calling for here seems to be an overall attitude of decoupling from self, and this would certainly decoupling from one’s own thinking from time to time. And my main point in all of this is that not many of us are very good at “giving up everything” when it comes to how we read the texts. What I mean is that we bring far too much of our own habits of understanding and of communication to the texts, and we insist on understanding them in ways most convenient to us, even if those are not the ways in which the authors or speakers intended them. Think about the irony of that!

Here’s Jesus again with yet another bold statement that horrifies many when they first see it:

John 12:25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Statements like these must be wrestled with—or not, of course. That is, we can wrestle to understand exactly what he meant, or we can just make a sloppy decision about it, or alternately, just ignore it altogether. And we could certainly grapple with the question of what he means here by “hate”, and whether it seems morally proper to “hate” one’s own life. And if we were to do that mental work, we’d be doing the very thing I’m promoting in this post. We’d be struggling to understand the sayings of someone who is quite different from us in some ways, and whose philosophy and communication habits are quite unlike ours in some ways. Indeed, are we the sort to go around saying that it’s best to “hate” our lives? No, probably not.

And really, should we be terribly surprised if understanding the thoughts of God and of God-inspired prophets takes a little work for us? Here’s how God famously put it through Isaiah’s prophetic pen:

Isaiah 55:9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Some will make the tragic mistake of assuming that what God’s meaning to convey here is something like, “So stop trying to understand things, dummy.” Many will read this verse and never stop to consider that those heavens above the earth were indeed visible to Isaiah’s audience. They were not imperceptible. They were not beyond any understanding. Sure, the literal stars in the sky were beyond counting, but many other things about them could be learned, such as their relative location, their brightness, their habitual paths across the sky, and their color. In fact, the ancients also spent enough time observing to notice that some of those things in the sky didn’t keep to their course as did the rest, but “wandered”. (They were noticing planets, which, unlike stars, are orbiting the sun, and move differently across the sky.) Indeed, much could be learned from observation of the heavens, just as much can be learned from observation of those thoughts and ways of God that have been set in print and delivered to humankind.

A QUESTION AND A DANGER

A fundamental question, therefore, is whether we think it is worth the trouble to try to understand the texts as they were intended by the writers and by the God who inspired them. And a fundamental danger is that we will, figuratively speaking, neglect that work and fashion those texts into some manner of idol that carries a meaning that’s different from what was intended, but that suits us just fine. This, too, is ironic—to go to the texts for understanding, and to walk away from them understanding it in a twisted way with which the writers and speakers would disagree!

One thing we all should keep in mind is that the Bible does not jump up from the table and slap us when we have failed to decouple from ourselves so as to understand it properly. We can fail in this way for our whole lives and never have it actively pointed out to us by the book. Sure, if we were listening/processing as we read, we’d be more likely to figure out our errors, but the Bible has no magical feature by which it actively alarms the non-listener/non-processor to his or her errors in understanding. Similarly, Jesus and God don’t generally come down here to tell us what we have got wrong after our Bible study sessions. (Perhaps you’ve noticed this!)

Even so, many Christians understand, however, the idea of a delayed accountability for our choices. A passage about this has come to my mind, particularly because it’s also about their failure to decouple from their self-view in order to have an accurate view of God. Consider the erroneous assumption they were making:

Psalm 50:21 When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you. But I now arraign you and set my accusations before you.

They were assuming that God would think they way they think. And is this not the very thing I’ve been getting at in this post regarding how we can err in assuming that the Bible writers and speakers would have communicated how we communicate, and how they would have been saying something that we ourselves would say? In cognitive science, they speak of a “consensus bias”, by which we overestimate how many others agree with us—or how much they agree with us. And that’s pretty much the same sort of thing that happens when we come to the Bible, failing to decouple from our own views of things, so as to accurately grasp how they saw things.

I think it’s far better to come to the Bible to get God’s view than to find some echo chamber for my own view. Indeed, that’s how I’d want people to read my writings, rather than to try to spin them into something I wouldn’t say or agree with. And I think that this Golden-Rule approach to studying scripture should serve us rather well.

There’s not enough decoupling going on, in my view of modern Christianity—-and there never has been. One major theme running throughout the Bible is that many never will listen—or will not listen for long. (I talk about that on my Bible podcast here.) Good listening requires decoupling from self long enough to consider what is being said, how it is being said, and what it meant. I do not think that the Christian world could be nearly so divided and trouble as it is today if we were all skilled and diligent at decoupling from self so as to embrace the Bible texts.

James Taylor has a lyric that comes to mind: “What good is this happy life when all you wanted from the start was to cry?” It’s about a person with a disposition that is not interested in what lies outside the person’s own habitual grief. Such a person is not open to becoming happy, but enjoys sadness more. And I think this serves nicely as a metaphor for what I’ve been talking about here—that it’s easy for us to go to the Bible for help, while really not being willing to go the full distance to getting that help. Sure, we can crack open the book, but that’s such a minimal effort, and can hardly compare to the full course of action that’s required to understand it as it was intended. And in this way, I think that a great many people deceive themselves that they have indeed considered God, when really, they’re just “going through the motions” without engaging their minds robustly. They find something surprising in the text, and they say, “Hmmm. That’s weird.” And then they walk away from it, never decoupling from themselves long enough to find out what the author/speaker meant and to learn how it should be understood. They may open the treasure chest, but never taken any of the treasures out of it. They may set the table, but never eat the meal. They may ask the question, but leave before it is answered. Or they may read the Bible for answers, but read their own erroneous ideas into it, and walk away thinking that their convictions are coming “from the Bible”.

Surely, God and Jesus are the most misunderstood people ever. Any many religious camps have been built on those misunderstandings. Meanwhile, few are they who see the value in decoupling from self so as to more fully understand God and Jesus—and who develop the skill to be good at it. Cognitive science tells us that people are quite prone to overestimate their knowledge, skills, and abilities—and I suppose we’re no different when it comes to surveying our own knowledge of God, and our ability to discern what he meant by the scriptures. My own big epiphany in 2011 or so was, “I am most likely wrong about many things”. And two convictions that followed were these:

1. Self-correction is the rightful duty of all humans. And,
2. I do not have a moral right to hold to a wrong opinion.

In time, all this would change my view of my own Bible study world from one of over-confidence to one in which my views became more provisional—where I became less apt to consider a matter closed, and instead, remained open long-term to new information and to better reasoning about the evidence. In other words, it shifted from “Here’s what I think” to “Here’s what I think at this point.” It also shifted somewhat from being one who, to use current vernacular, “identified” as one with some certain conviction on some matter, to one who was willing to decouple from the vanity of obsessing over my own “identity”, and who invested more on understanding the identity of God and Jesus and on mining the depths of scripture in search of a true understanding of what was said, done, taught, and believed in those ancient times. And while I’m still frustrated with what all I don’t know about the Bible, I’ve certainly seen some progress in these latter years that exceeds the progress I made before.

Really, it’s about learning to quit listening to ourselves long enough so as to be able to listen to someone else—in this case, God and Jesus and the apostles and prophets. And if we’re going to do that, we’re going to have to learn—to really learn—how the Bible told the story. If we were to sit down to write out the Bible story in our own words, we would not do it as they did, for we are a different sort of people, with different conventions in how to communicate such things. And we, stubborn as we are, have a very hard time letting their writings be what they are. We can barely manage not to interpret them the way we habitually interpret things, yet that’s exactly what we must learn to do all the time.

If God were to sit us down for a few weeks and explain the Bible to us from his point of view, I’m pretty sure we would be quickly overwhelmed with the number of our own interpretive errors that would become obvious in such sessions—and probably before we got to the end of Genesis 1! Indeed, we might not even make it through the first three verses before we had to stop and ask God, “Would you please repeat that?”

We live in a hearsay culture—a meme culture—where we pass around trite understandings and platitudes far more often than we look deeply into matters for ourselves. But God is the sort to pierce through that, and to bid people to “Give careful thought to your ways” and to “Stop judging by mere appearances and make a right judgment.” And if we were particularly keen about all this, and about our own tendency to be mentally lazy, we might complain back to God, “But what you’re saying requires us to be careful and to think and to stop ourselves from making bad judgments, and to make ourselves judge rightly—and all these things take work—and we don’t like work.” And he might say in reply, “Uh-huh.”

He has given most of us the standard human brain, and it’s capable of this sort of reflective work. It’s capable of decoupling and of problem solving, and of imagining the possibilities, and so forth. And we might just choose to turn the focus of our minds back on the one who created our species, and apply ourselves to understanding him—not as an expression of our own personality and identity, but for the value of understanding him.

It’s not that our society doesn’t appreciate proofs of things. Generally, they do. In the right situation, they love seeing the hero or heroine present a slam-dunk case–as in this brilliant scene from the genius film, My Cousin Vinny. (Be advised, though, the film makes copious use of profanity—though not in the scene shown below.)

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If you want to help people, it’s worth noting that you generally have to work with people to do it. And people can be prickly and messy and unpredictable and ungrateful. So there’s that. But then, they can also embrace the help, benefit from it, and become perpetually thankful to you for it. So there’s that, too. And you’re going to get both—if you’re lucky—probably with less of the latter than of the former.

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Most of the time, in most matters, most people do what most people do.

I don’t mean to suggest that nobody ever has original thoughts or actions. I only mean to suggest that other people are often our guide in life. After all, it’s easier that way. Thinking for ourselves requires more mental energy than most find convenient, and it’s almost always easier to follow a crowd than to blaze one’s own trail. When the crowd has got it right, following the crowd can be a valuable time-saving, effort-saving strategy.

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Humans at their best are a wonder. Humans at their worst are a horror. And humans in their everyday mode?

Well, they vary so much that it’s hard to generalize. But few, it seems, strive for their best in all matters.

Here’s something that a lot of Christians might not know—or keep in mind— about Jesus’ reputation in the First Century:

“And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well.” Mark 7:37a

They found this astonishing that a person would be excellent like that. And what’s more, his followers were expected to be excellent, too:

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I think that Christianity is in a state of emergency. There is a huge difference between what it is supposed to be, and what it actually is. Let me try to explain briefly what surely deserves many articles to treat thoroughly.

Christianity is supposed to be a human subculture in which people honor God for his righteousness, wisdom, and love, and strive to live in his “image” themselves in all their “ways”, both in their own thoughts and in the how they treat one another. They are supposed to be able to learn how to get along well with one another, to grow and to mature in their thoughts and character, and to come to understand deep and meaningful things. They’re supposed to be able to work well together, and in all this, should serve as some sort of a “light” in this dark world.

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Here’s an old discussion forum post of mine, slightly edited to fit the blog genre better.

I’ve seen several people in online discussions about faith suggest that the true or best test of whether someone has a “saving faith” (or whatever you might rather have it called) is in whether you see the effects of that faith played out in their lives. In other words, they suggest that if the faith is really there, it will lead to the good “fruit” of godly behavior.

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Having made a study for over a decade about the shortcomings of people’s cognitive habits, it’s an obvious question: How does that play out when it comes to religion? Do people tend to make the standard errors in thinking on religious topics, too? Or do they somehow tend to do better when it comes to religion? Or worse?

Well, I can tell you this much so far: They don’t tend to do better when it comes to religion than they do in their casual daily reasoning about secular things. This much, I can demonstrate by simply walking through the things they publish and examining the numbers and types of errors made. But more troubling still is this: They may actually tend to do worse when it comes to religion, precisely because the way that so many practice their religion, when religious topics arise, they’re not actually thinking about it at all, but are merely reciting memorized sayings to themselves. That’s a different process from thinking. It’s largely a conditioned response—a trained habit: When this comes up, say that to yourself. When this question arises, tell yourself that answer. When someone makes this observation, you answer with this other observation. When someone mentions this life problem, you recite the trite saying we’re also supposed to say to ourselves in response to it.

Again, this kind of mental activity is not thinking really, but a shortcut that cognitive scientists generally refer to as heuristics. As it turns out, there’s other stuff you can do with your mind–other than actual thinking—other than posing problems and analyzing how things are and examining potential interpretations of a situation, etc. These kinds of things do require thinking (which requires slow and deliberate, high-energy-burn mental processes), whereas other types of mental activity I’m talking about can be done almost instantaneously, and do not require any high-energy burn or original work in the mind.

When it comes to religion, my observation is that for a great many, they are so deeply conditioned in what to believe—in how to answer this question—or in how to reply to that statement—or in what do say to yourself or someone else when this or that happens—that relatively few have developed a habit of doing actual algorithmic and reflective thinking about things for themselves. Rather–and this is not good news–they tend to reply with these heuristic responses that are instantaneous shortcuts to thinking, and that don’t require more than a second of mental attention. It’s about as close to mindlessness as one can get for an activity that happens in the mind.

Now, let me stop right here to state for the record that the systems in our brain that carry out these heuristic shortcuts were designed by none other than God himself! They are not there as the result of some mental deformity. Nor are they there as the result of some curse on mankind at the event commonly referred to as “The Fall”. No, they are part of God’s wonderful design for the human mind. They are not the whole of that design, mind you, but only part of it. And therein lies the problem.

The rest of our mental faculties—those “slow” processes of algorithmic and reflective thinking that deal with analysis and problem solving and executive function and diligent, evidence/weighing decision making—these faculties are quite underdeveloped in most of us, as in our culture at large. The individual tends toward “cognitive miserliness”, where the will is lacking to “spend” the energy (do the work) necessary to get good at such thinking. And meanwhile, living in a society made up of a high number of such cognitive misers doesn’t help us to rise above it ourselves. When you live in a heuristics-rich/thinking-poor society, any good and robust thinking you end up doing is likely to be done despite the habits of those around you, and not because of them.

In a religion such as we can discern from the Bible texts, you have an all-wise, all-knowing God whose moral and cognitive excellence inspires humans to think and operate on a higher level. The excellence of God inspires the human (potentially) to be more like his Creator–to make more of himself by trying–to make better and fuller use of the faculties he was given by the nature of what kind of being he was created to be.

But what should we expect to see in a religious camp that is not duly impressed with the high cognitive/moral example of God? Would we expect to see many members rising above the dull societal average for thinking and morality in order to be more like a God that does not impress them much?

I would not.

And isn’t that what we tend to see across the churches, generally speaking?

I think it is.

As I write this, I have in mind a recent post about being thrust into the spotlight at jury duty. (I wish you’d take a couple of minutes to read it now.) It’s about how most of us don’t deliberately make much of ourselves cognitively, and about how interesting it is when we’re suddenly on the hot seat with important questions being put to us.

This happens in religion, too. Having never been trained in the best practices of thinking and philosophy, in religion, we can find ourselves in conversations that are “above our pay grade”, so to speak—discussing topics we don’t know much about. But even so, if we’re good at self-observation (which is slightly harder than observing others accurately), we may well catch ourselves merely saying stuff—not because we have analyzed the situation and know what is right to say—but because we have got stuff memorized, and we have got ourselves a habit of saying stuff like this in situations like these. And out it comes, with no referee present to call it fair or foul. We’ve just said it, and there it is. And questions like the following (about what we’ve just said) may or may not ever see the light of day:

• Do I really believe what I just said?
• How do I know that?
• Do I know that?
• Why did it say it so confidently, if I’m not really sure?
• Whoever taught me to say that thing—where did he or she learn it from?
• Could I prove what I just said if someone called me on it?
• Have I ever listed my doubts or questions about what I just said?
• Have I ever gone diligently through those doubts and questions to see if they can be answered well?
• What if I were wrong about this?
• Should I retract my statement?

Now, I believe that these questions are the sort generally involved in “giving careful thought” to ourselves, and “examining” ourselves, which practice the Bible commends in several places.

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.

Proverbs 4:26–niv

Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways.

Haggai 1:5–NIV

Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?

2 Corinthians 13:5–NIV

Interestingly, we frequently see others say things that they have not duly vetted first—things they have not given careful thought to, nor examined, nor tested first. (It’s easier to see it when they do it than when we do it ourselves.) The more we observe this—and take the time to make note of it and the typical behaviors that accompany it—the more likely we might be to notice when we do it ourselves.

I can attest that these sorts of errors are very common in our casual lives. I think that most of us are not well equipped to avoid them, and that even if we were to set out for some unusual occasion to write a short essay on some religious topic over a long weekend, we would not be in good enough cognitive shape to do it well. We have so many bad mental habits that are common in our culture, that we cannot perceive every one of them when it shows up in our argumentation. Sure, some of them we will spot right away, just as we might spot some of our grammatical or spelling errors. But a lot of where we go wrong is in things about which we simply have not yet learned better. So the error we are making is, to us, sound thinking, and is not in need to analysis or correction. We will not spot it because we don’t know how–and because we don’t have enough general knowledge of the scriptures to know when our views are at odds with the various teachings there.

Some years ago, I began wishing for a grant to fund a study in which I’d analyze episodes of talk show hosts for fact, logic, and sourcing—to score them on how they did on whichever sample episode was chosen for the project. I thought it would be a fascinating study to see how often bad logic is used—or how often error is put forth as fact, and so forth. And I now have in mind to do similar work, based on religious primers put forth by various organizations–where I take their official introductory videos and analyze them for they quality of their mental work. After some brief sampling (and years of pondering such things), I imagine that we’d discover that the standard fare is in quite rough shape, and that a large percentage of what is put forth in religious instruction is in need of considerable correction itself.

And I’m talking about facts, as well as about the kind of reasoning that is used in support of the things we think ought to be taught as fact. I think that if we were to get ourselves into this sort of analytical mode, we’d end up finding much cause for concern the state of things. But not many people seem to be very comfortable staying in that analytical mode. They don’t like seeing the mess–and don’t want to admit to the extent of it. It is emotionally easier for them to sweep it under the rug, and to pretend that it’s probably not all that important in the overall scheme of things. And this can make mindless church activity even all the more attractive as an escape of sorts.

And that kind of mindless behavior seems quite common. And it would also seem quite “normal”—except to someone who has a high appreciation for the fact that God and Jesus and the apostles and prophets are not like that. They would see it as messed up. Twisted. Irresponsible.

And it is.

Our memorized, memish sayings that we automatically repeat to others and to ourselves—the faculty for this was created by God. But it is mean to be managed well, such that we don’t train ourselves to repeat dumb junk to ourselves and others, as we so often do. It’s an amazingly useful tool to always have good and wise and righteous and useful sayings on the tips of our tongues. But when quality control has been compromised, and it’s turned out that the stuff that’s always on the mind is trite and shallow and foolish, then we’re not making good use of those mental faculties God gave us. This is why the Bible has those exhortations about examining oneself and giving careful thought to one’s ways. Without that, we’re doomed to end up saying dumb junk to ourselves and to others. And from there, it snowballs into a messy religion—which is quite what we are seeing today in our society.

And I suppose it has always been like this, for Jesus himself noted quite famously that there is indeed a narrow gate and a wide one, and that many will travel the latter. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that the wide gate will ever be untraveled by the masses. No, it seems to be the message of the Bible that it’s always the few, and not the many, who will get things right.

I write this post, therefore, to encourage those few who may be bewildered about the sad cognitive/moral state of things at church. I’d encourage you to remember that church is not the Savior, but Jesus is. Church is not the Creator. It is not the Image. It is not the “way”. No, Jesus is. If righteous, diligent, honest thinking doesn’t happen to be the standard at your church, it’s still the standard in Jesus’ mind—and you can still adopt it, even if you can’t find a church that wants it, too. You can still train yourself to be godly by use of the scriptures, even if it should happen that you can’t find a fellowship of like-minded believers in your town.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Romans 12:2–NIV

Many, who think they’re doing a good thing, merely train themselves in the hearsay of church, rather than training themselves how to think the thoughts that God and Jesus think. And having chosen the wrong standard, they have cut themselves off from the source of all good thinking. They have followed the churches away from God and Jesus, and are in no position to figure that out until they begin to study and think through the scriptures for themselves. And upon doing that, they are discovering a whole new world, so far beyond the run-of-the-mill cognitive life of the average joe, for they are tapping into the mind of God, where they can learn at their own risk—whether well or poorly—to think God’s thoughts to whatever extent humans are capable of that.

And let me encourage you with this: Whatever may be the limits of all that, they run much further than many at church will ever realize.

How instructive to learn about you
That you had decided you wanted to be
An “Influencer”
Before you had ever learned anything worth
Sharing with others.

Perhaps you could go learn to be a
Mature human before wanting
Other humans to count you
A prime example of humanity.

As it is, you are lusting after
The high esteem of stupid people.

The fool thinks that only the goodness of his intentions should be counted, and not the wisdom of what he has done. He will not be held to account for the latter, and if you bring it up, you are the monster.

He thinks he already won the moral victory by wanting to do what he thought was good in the first place. He’s incapable (at present) of reasoning that he is as much responsible for the outcome of his actions as he is for the intention of them. Don’t expect him to be any more rational in this than are the Appalachian snake handlers in what they do. He is blinded to it, and capable only of seeing the one thing: that he intended good.

He will be offended—outraged, even—when you bring up anything else. And he will cheat fact, logic, and sourcing in an attempt to deny you the right to discuss the whole of the matter. That’s what fools do. He will think his case deserves to be heard, and that if only everyone could hear it, he would be vindicated in the eyes of all those who are reasonable.

He has no idea what it is to run the gauntlet, to have one’s ideas put to the test of fact, logic, and sourcing. Since he has not tested his own ideas—but merely assumed them just and fair and reasonable since they emanated (if they did) from his own mind—he will be flummoxed when he cannot prevail with them in the public forum. He will conclude that he has been wronged, and that the people did not listen to him—not because his case is unworthy, but because they are unworthy.

And on his way out, he will tell himself whatever it takes to satisfy him that he need look no further into the wisdom of his ways. This kind of thinking is what got him into the mess, and it’s what delivers him away from the forum, still a fool.

He leaves a mess in his wake.

This is what fools do.

Pretty much by definition, they do not learn.