I’M RIGHT—YOU’RE WRONG

I have been a news junkie most of my life, something I am pretty sure I inherited from my father. I can sort of remember as a relatively new reader waiting somewhat impatiently for my father to finish reading the newspaper so I could have a chance at it, not just for the funny pages but for the front page and the opinion page and all the other stuff contained within the pages. I probably spend at least a couple of hours a day reading and watching news from a variety of sources.

This can be a depressing occupation—I have many friends who simply refuse to pay any attention to news in any form. All of those friends think I am a bit strange but I can live with that. What I can’t live with is not knowing what is going on in the world.

I am pretty sure that a major part of my desire to know what is going on in the world comes from the fact that I am by nature an accumulator and analyser of information, which I then use to develop theories, understand trends, project possibilities and illustrate sermons and Bible studies. I like to know and understand what is going on so that I can make projections about what is coming.

These days, my thinking as a result of the news reports I imbibe are making me nervous. There is a powerful force towards disunity, division and dissension being exhibited all over the world these days. Everyone wants their own way—and anyone or anything that stands in the way of that is wrong. And when someone or something is wrong, they can be ridiculed, put down, sidelined, disrespected, attacked physically, legislated against, demonized—I can’t think of any more words but the picture should be clear.

Our world is following a dangerous road because the less respect and appreciation we have for others and their ideas, the more we increase the potential for conflict. The less I see someone and their ideas as valid, the more likely I am to treat them as less than human. The more I see difference as a threat, the more likely I am to attack. The bigger the threat, the more serious the attack. The progression from words to civil action to legislative action to physical action is well documented and strongly in evidence all over the world.

Whether it is one politician calling into question the intelligence or nationalism of another; a person of one sexual orientation calling someone of another a pervert; a person of one race abusing a person of another race; a zealot bombing the home of an opposing zealot the pattern is clear—we are developing a new ethic that allows us to hate and disrespect and abuse those whose views and ideas are different from ours.

Except that this isn’t a new ethic. It is almost the oldest ethical approach in the book. One early version of the process has one man killing his brother because the brother got praised for his sacrifice to God. This approach to life and others has repeated itself throughout history—it seems we human beings can’t get enough of hatred, prejudice and self-centeredness. I, my, me always seeks to come out on top—we all want them to be at least subservient to us—and it would be even better if they simply didn’t exist. And history is filled with stories of people who tried to get rid of all the “thems” in their world.

There is, of course, a different way, a way also contained in the book that has the story of the brother killing his brother. That way involves embracing the other, respecting the different, seeking the common ground between we and them. Of course, there is a catch to this other way.

Before we can really follow the other way, we have to acknowledge that neither we nor they are at the centre of creation. Creation isn’t human-centric. It is God-centric. And when we begin to see that God is at the centre, we can begin to see things differently, if we are willing to submit to the God who is really at the centre of all creation. As we submit and begin to see things through God’s eyes, the differences we magnify become less and less important.

May the peace of God be with you.

YES OR NO?

I like simple answers, answers that make it clear that something is one thing or another. But life has a way of making those simple answers much more complicated than I—or many others, for that matter—are comfortable with. Take a simple situation that occurs frequently in my life. I want to know the colour of something. My wife will tell me that what I am looking at is purple. Simple answer to a simple question.

Except that the answer isn’t that simple. Because I have red-green colour blindness, I have never actually seen the colour purple. Intellectually, I will grant that it exists. The red and blue light frequencies combine to create another colour that some people find pleasing. But for someone who has difficulty seeing red, purple isn’t actually purple—it is generally some shade of blue, although as the colour balance in that particular purple includes more and more red, it becomes some weird frankencolour that I prefer not to look at or think about.

For my wife and most other people in the world, something is either purple or not. For me and a few others, purple exists in theory but in practise, we see a variety of shades of blue or some mashup that we actually can’t identify. The simple answer to the simple question, “What colour is that?” becomes more complex and very subjective.

And it also becomes controversial. My wife and I have this habitual debate on the reality of purple. I claim it doesn’t exist and she claims it does. This is one of those familiar and comfortable jokes that married couples develop over their time together, something to smile about and enjoy. But I am sure that somewhere, some militant colourist is willing to bluntly tell me how wrong I am and that purple exists and my unwillingness to see it or admit its existence is illegal, immoral, sinful, stupid or part of a vast conspiracy threatening the whole of western civilization.

Well, maybe it isn’t quite that bad. But we do live in a culture where people who want simple yes or no answers are more and more upset with the discovery that answers aren’t as simple anymore. Now, most people really don’t get all that upset over the discovery that for some of us, the existence of purple is less black and white than they would like. But there are whole areas of life where people are being confronted by complex answers to seemingly simple questions.

Questions dealing with gender or sexual orientation for example, are producing much more complicated answers in some circles. At one point, you were either blue or pink—now, there is a whole rainbow and people are quite happy choosing a place on that rainbow for themselves and insisting that it is who they are. The blue and pink answer proponents are deeply upset with the rainbow and the rainbow proponents are deeply upset with the blue and pink proponents.

Questions dealing with faith are much more complicated as well. I grew up in a time and place where you were either a Christian or you weren’t. Sure, there were a few, generally in other denominations, who might claim faith but we true believers knew that they were only fooling themselves. True believers looked and thought like us. But now, well, it seems like anything goes. People who follow the traditional path, literally walking the aisle, find themselves confronted by people who wonder about the divinity of Christ, whether he actually existed let alone rose from the dead, who are still comfortable calling themselves Christian. The simple yes or no has become a theological debate that angers and enrages everyone.

It seems like we are generally predisposed to simple binary answers but are discovering more and more that the simple binary answers are much more complicated than we want them to be. I really don’t know what the solution is. But maybe the way I deal with purple is some help.

In spite of my running joke with my wife, I know that purple exists. My inability to see it doesn’t change the reality of purple. I have to live with the fact that for most people, purple exists but for me, it doesn’t. Ultimately, life is complicated and I need to accept the reality that there is more going on than I see or understand and maybe I have to trust that in the end, God knows what is going on, even if I don’t.

May the peace of God be with you.

I AM NOT A PSYCHOPATH

Since much of my work in the “office” involves writing using the computer, it isn’t surprising that a lot of my mini-breaks also involve the computer. Sometimes, the break involves a game of solitaire while my brain finalizes the second point of the sermon to the point where I can type it out. Now and then, when I need a longer break, the home page on my browser contains a never-ending buffer of stories, articles and pictures.

During a break the other day, I clicked on an article suggesting that people who do a certain thing might be a psychopath. The article suggested that people who drink their coffee black and who make a point of letting people they drink it black just might be psychopaths. From the day I began seriously drinking coffee, I have drunk it black with no sugar. I have also been known to proclaim that if God meant us to have milk and sugar in coffee, he would have created milk and sugar trees linked to the coffee trees. So, obviously I am a psychopath.

I wasn’t actually ready to accept that diagnosis, especially since I have some background in psychology and have done almost every psychological test invented at some point and never had even a small indication of psychopathology show up. But rather than simply click out of the article, I kept going. Way down near the end of the article, the author indicated that the black coffee thing was only one out of many many other things that were found to be correlated with the issue and the correlation with black coffee was actually fairly small.

So, instead of saying if you drink black coffee, you might be a psychopath, the article would have been much more honest to suggest that a very small percentage of people who drink black coffee have a chance of being a psychopath, which is pretty much the same as saying that a small percentage of any identified group of people might be psychopaths. But such truthful but vague statements don’t entice people to click and therefore don’t increase the views of the page, which I suppose puts up advertising rates.

The article does illustrate perfectly a dangerous and all too common human reality. We have a tendency to categorize and define people on the basis of one or two obvious characteristics or qualities, which may or may not actually have anything to do with the reality of that person.

So, for example, it isn’t hard to find someone telling us that all Muslims are terrorists and all evangelicals are republican. All illegal immigrants are criminals. All politicians are liars. All car salespeople are crooked and dishonest. The list goes on and on—and is as misleading and wrong as calling black coffee drinkers psychopaths. But we all do this.

There is an antidote to this kind of thinking. Rather than define people by one or two almost incidental traits, we get to know people. We move beyond the identified marker and we discover the real person. Occasionally, we are going to have our initial assessment proven right—but in general, we are going to find that behind the biased and ignorant assumption, there is a real person, a person with whom we can have a great relationship and even deep friendship.

But that takes both effort and courage. It takes courage to break out of our carefully defined boxes and embrace what is different or unknown or too quickly defined. And then, because the person we have categorized has likely been the victim of fast and mindless categorization before, it takes effort to develop the kind of relationship that allows each of us to get to know the other. It is much easier and simpler in the end to watch for the one or two defined markers and place the person in the appropriate box.

But most of the time, the markers don’t tell us what we think they tell us and the boxes we use don’t really work for us or the other. I drink black coffee—but I am actually not a psychopath. I am an evangelical Christian but I am not a republican—actually, I am not even American. Maybe, if we sit down and have a coffee, we can actually see beyond the preconceptions and get to really know each other. By the way, I take my coffee black, the way God meant it to be drunk.

May the peace of God be with you.