Tried With Fire

In the light of the latest round of accusations and all around ugliness on social media, here are some random ruminations and questions for myself: Do I pray before I respond? Do I pray that my response would be Christ-like? Do I pray for the people who I am responding to? Would I say what I tweet or post to another brother or sister, particularly a brother or sister in my local church? Social media seems to give vent to words that we would never say face to face or so it seems. Incidentally, studies show that venting only increases anger rather than dissipating it. [ Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) Tavris & Aronson.] Do I take "Love your neighbor as yourself" seriously? Do I believe I am called to love according to 1 Corinthians 13 and demonstrate kindness, patience, and forbearance? Am I willing to admit that I am wrong about a situation or people? Am I willing to learn about others who are different than myself? I still may disagree but I have a better u...

I'm still listening/reading Thinking Fast and Slow. I probably need to go back and read the book more slowly because almost every aspect of how we think gets tackled.  I just finished the section on the Illusion of Pundits in which the validity of so-called experts (political, economic, etc.) comes under scrutiny. They are not as expert as they think they are or we want to believe. In a study of pundits, Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, found out that: "experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large collection of excuses: they had been wrong only in their timing, an unforeseeable event had intervened, or they had been wrong but for the right reasons. Experts are just human in the end. They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not by what they believe, but by how they think, says Tetlock. He uses the terminology from Isaiah Berl...

When emotions run high and opinions are strong, social media reflects that. The tweets and statuses may be preaching to the choir or not. They may disperse into the ether without making a blip on anyone's consciousness, or they could potentially wound a fellow saint. As I've seen the volleys go back and forth even yesterday, it saddens me. But lest I point the finger out there, have I ever given any indication that I would: - Disrespect or mock a fellow believer if I found out that we disagreed and pressure them to agree with me? - Be unwilling to listen? Not care enough to learn more and try to understand where someone is coming from even if the disagreement still stands? - Be the last person they would go to because of lack of empathy/sympathy? God forgive me if I have done so, and I would ask the same of you, my brothers and sisters. The interaction among opposing sides is getting less and less civil in the culture at large, and it is rubbing off on us. And yet th...

Helping you let the opinions of strangers on the internet determine your quality of life:

Social media can be a rather rude place at times. There are moments of thoughtful give-and-take, but there are moments when the interaction consists of name calling those in the opposition. Maybe I'm becoming an old fuddy-duddy, but I'm not impressed with the latter. Rather than strengthening a person's position, it seems to weaken it, in my opinion. Any reasonable debate about an idea is lost in the rapid exchange of derogatory comments, and maybe that's the point. Maybe we've lost the whole concept of debating ideas for the sake of the truth in the desire to have the last word, even if that last word is an insult. In With Good Reason , the author gives details of several fallacies of presumption. Here's what he has to say about the fallacy of begging-the-question epithets: [T]he error lies in the use of stated language that reaffirms what we wish to prove but have not yet proved. An epithet is a descriptive word or phrase used to characterize a person,...