My Sunday School class recently changed the books that we are using. I was in on the vote and agree with the change. Much of the evangelical attraction to Calvinism is in the fact that you get a real dose of theology in studying it rather than starving on the intellectual candy of most Sunday School workbooks. Who decided that Sunday School students couldn’t handle a real education? We are not stupid.
I have come across a problem in the new workbooks. These books are not into Calvinism, so that is not what I am getting at. My stand up philosophy for the day will be light on the specifics because they would get in the way of the point that I am trying to make. The lesson that I just read testifies to the thoughts and motivations of people whose actual motives are not known.
You can guess at the reasons that people act the way that we do. Man is bounded by his intelligence and, thusly, incapable of acting in a truly random way. These motivations have to be consistent with the known actions of the people involved under the conditions that were known to actually be present. However, you should never testify to these assertions as fact. Very few of us are telepathic and even fewer of them can read people across oceans of time.
What is it with the belief that all actions are the result of emotional reflexes? Have you ever sat down and composed a sonnet in a fit of rage? Any action that takes place over a long period of time is not the result of an emotional response. Thinking and feeling are opposing forces. Why are we so blind to the realities of the world in which we live most of our lives?
Even when it is not ascribing blind emotions to the motives of the people who oppose us, we still assign people reasoning that agrees entirely with our own way of thinking. Some of the reasons that we assign to people who disagree with us are so strongly aligned with our being right that they never would occur to anybody who honestly holds a viewpoint countering our own. As with any theory, try to project the unknown actions of your opponent based upon the motives that you have assigned him. When your projections are way off, you can rest assured that you have given your opponent the wrong reasoning for his opposition to you. That is the kind of thing that I am seeing in these workbooks.
Computers have an acronym GIGO; Garbage-In, Garbage-Out. It means that the best login in the world cannot correct faulty input. We counter this problem, in programming, by filtering the input data for sanity. The human mind is not much different than a computer in this respect. When you start with a mistake, all of the results are going to be just as far off.
Would it not be better not to presume in the first place? People can lie about their motivations. That happens and I will not deny it. What I am calling for is a reliance on facts alone. We can think for ourselves. Only the truth makes sense in the end.
My final point of stand up philosophy for this paper is a warning to avoid anachronisms. Do not assume that the present state of things applies to either the past or the future. Things used to be different and they will become different again. The past does not fit into our mold for the way that things are. Can we handle the truth?
Just because we have a current view of our world does not mean that it is right. The fact that things were once done differently does not mean that they were out of place for their time. Context is important to understanding. What value is there in blaming the past for not being the present?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.