“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott
“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott
Our temptation is to begin with politics and then try to figure out how religion can fit in. We start with the accepted parameters of political debate and, whether we find ourselves on the left or the right, we use religion to justify and bolster our existing commitments….
Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson
Memory
As an older man, I see my past slipping away. My memory seems fine from a medical point-of-view, but the truth is that we only remember moments of our past. Those moments are often sustained by photographs, souvenirs, and stories. Indeed, the stories have a striking way of mis-remembering, the story supplanting the event itself. Tell the story wrong for enough times and you come to believe it yourself. The cult of the past is often a covenant with a lie.
Fr Stephen Freeman
We don’t know our true values until they’re tested
“Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” June 1, 1998 — the Southern Baptist Convention
Evangelicals thought they valued integrity in politicians, and they held to that conviction until the very moment it carried a cost. That is when courage failed. David French
C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” We don’t know if we’re actually honest until we tell the truth when the truth will hurt us.
Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness.
1 John 2:9
Political hatred is amply documented. According to a recent studyby More in Common, a nonpartisan organization that does research on political and cultural differences, 86 percent of Republicans believe Democrats are brainwashed, 84 percent believe Democrats are hateful and 71 percent believe Democrats are racist. Democrats have an even dimmer view of Republicans — 88 percent believe Republicans are brainwashed, 87 percent believe Republicans are hateful and 89 percent believe Republicans are racist.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matt 5:43-48
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. Romans 12:14-19
Somewhere between overthinking and underthinking is responsible and responsive thinking.
Jim Gordon
Thinking about … observations from trusted sources about my posts, particularly related to their length, I have decided revise “So Much To Think About” to “A Few Thoughts”. Hopefully they will land between overthinking and underthinking.
Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher. A Japanese Proverb
The Christian Life
The Christian life is not an accessory to the life you already have, but a radical transformation of life itself. Anything less is religion,not faith…
Phoenix Preacher
Speaking to others
We must receive all words of God tenderly and subtly, so that we can speak them to others with tenderness and subtlety. I would even say that anything said with too much bravado, over-assurance, or with any need to control or impress another, is never the voice of God within us. If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of ourselves or others, it is not likely the voice of God.
If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks, but sadly, it is too often how?we?talk—to ourselves and to one another.
Richard Rohr
Transcendence
“…wherever and whenever humans do life—and seek transcendence—together, it is both terrible and beautiful.” James Baldwin “…a common element within human experience can be suggested by the word “transcendent.” It is an experience of beauty, of goodness, of wonder, that goes beyond itself. It demands poetry and art, songs and symbols.” Fr Stephen Freeman
William James described transcendent experience: — a sense of reality— a feeling of objective presence— a perception of something there.
a transcendent experience.
Walking Alive Glorious day, warm breezes, colorful leaves, bright sunshine. Cemetery, mowed and manicured, Glistening monuments mute death’s specter. Fresh grave, beautiful flowers. Wonder of life and death. Chance encounter. Conversation. Graveside reconciliation. Lovers rendezvous Sadness Present Alive
Thanks for this day, a day of my life. And wonders.1 Denise Levertov
“Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.” – Eric Hoffer
metaphysical belonging,
— a sense that your life fits into a broader scheme of meaning and eternal values.
If you lack metaphysical belonging, you have to rely on social belonging for all your belonging needs, which requires you to see your glorious self reflected in the attentions and affirmations of others. This leads to the fragile narcissism that Lasch saw coming back in 1979: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”
David Brooks
Discover Joy
God, who is forever pouring out God’s whole being from all eternity, wants you to flourish. God wants you to be filled with joy and excitement and ever longing to be able to find what is so beautiful in God’s creation: the compassion of so many, the caring, the sharing. And God says, Please, my child, help me. Help me to spread love and laughter and joy and compassion. And you know what, my child? As you do this—hey, presto—you discover joy. Joy, which you had not sought, comes as the gift, as almost the reward for this non-self-regarding caring for others.
Dalai Lama
Cosmic Dance
When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bash? we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
Thomas Merton
Memory
We honor pain through memory and we know that people die twice—the second time when no one on earth still speaks their name.
In Judaism God is called Zochair kol Hanishkachot—the one who remembers all things forgotten.
Hebrew has a word that applies only to bereaved parents, shakul. Can one conceive of a history so studded with such loss that there needs to be a designated word?
For the Jewish people amnesia is not an option. Jewish memory is both a tribute and a harbinger. It is what we owe to God, and to those who suffered and those who died. The dead should not be forgotten in the press of the everyday. The poignancy of loss cannot be fully calmed by the blanket of passing time.
David Wolpe
Heartbreak
Heartbreak is about crushed expectations. The problem is that we’ve made romance into such a fantasy that anything short of a Hallmark movie feels like failure. We’ve created generation after generation more in love with this idealized love than with the person. The inability to distinguish this is what causes so much pain.
Why don’t we have high school classes about romantic relationships? We could separate the fantasy from the reality to forewarn our children so they can better handle the flood of hormones and peer pressure. Instead, we give them useless clichés like, “When it’s love, you’ll just know.” While that may be true, most people “just know” many times—and are wrong.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar
Modern World
The modern world is a culture of “fatherless children” (sometimes quite literally). The past (and thus the place and source of our origins) is always seen as something to be overcome. The notion of “progress” includes a forgetting of the past and the reduction of its power in our lives. We seek to self-create and self-define our lives as though we had no source outside of ourselves.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Cultural Christianity
When we insert religion inside of culture, culture wins every time. Most of us are Americans or our nationalities first, and then maybe, once in a while, we are Christians. That’s just obvious—it’s our cultures that form us. We want to believe, we keep pretending we believe, but we really don’t.
Richard Rohr
Scripture
The purpose of Scripture is to not to get a passing grade in Religion 101, rather, the purpose of Scripture is to bring people to believe in Jesus, to come to Jesus, to grasp hold of Jesus, to rest in the one whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light (Matthew 11:30)
Michael Bird
The Irony of Infamy
By the time Rose’s 24 -year career came to an end in 1986 he had become MLB’s all-time leader in hits, games played, at bats, singles, and outs. He was Rookie of the Year, won three World Series championships, three batting titles, two Golden Glove Awards, and one Most Valuable Player Award. He also made 17 All-Star appearances at an unequaled five different positions: first base, second base, third base, left field and right field.
…eighteen months after Rose was banned from baseball and the same year Rose would have been first eligible for the Hall of Fame, its directors voted to exclude individuals on baseball’s permanently ineligible list. This new rule prevented Rose from ever being admitted to the Hall of Fame.
“What, are they waiting for me to die?” Rose repeatedly would say of his chances of getting into the Hall of Fame. “Wouldn’t that be horrible if I died next week and then next year they reinstated me?”
Well, he’s dead, but the controversy continues. If, some day, he is inducted to the HOF, will he be remembered for baseball or betting?
Reverberation from the Echo Chamber
The Importance of Being Wrong
A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right , basically all the time , about basically everything : about our political and intellectual convictions , our religious and moral beliefs , our assessment of other people , our memories , our grasp of facts . As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it , our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient . Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority , the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition . Far from being a moral flaw , it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities : empathy , optimism , imagination , conviction , and courage . And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance , wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change . Thanks to error , we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world . ... it is ultimately wrongness , not rightness , that can teach us who we are . Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
The above quotes capture the paradox each of us find ourselves in as we strive for meaningful and authentic lives. An unrelenting pursuit of rightness is pitted against our incontrovertible fallibility. Amazingly, left to our own devices, rightness will almost always win out. Our desire for rightness leads us to echo chambers where our “rightness” is amplified and error is filtered out. Like a butterfly from a cocoon, we emerge in the beauty of our rightness, confirmed in our infallibility.
The cost of rightness can be high.
Avoidance of controversial issues or alternative solutions creates a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. Rightness binds and blinds us. An “illusion of invulnerability” (an inflated certainty of our rightness) can prevail. Stereotyping of, and dehumanizing actions toward, dissenting persons can develop. As true believers we can produce fantasies that don’t match reality. Interpersonal communication outside our echo chamber is stifled. Immersion in the comfortable confines of an echo chamber may result in significant losses, not the least of which, can be family and community relationships.Echo chambers reinforce our natural tendency to restrict our relationships rather than expand our social interactions. Residing within an echo chamber strips our lives of serendipity and wonder. We trade off the opportunity to engage the endless diversity of the world around us.
Bed ridden and dying last November, Landon Saunders was asked “ Do you have any fear knowing your death is immanent? In reply, he said “ If I am honest I am a little afraid of the dying process, but I wouldn’t mind missing the next election.”
Deconstructors
What we are seeing in the deconstructors at the heart of our study is not that they left the faith or left the church altogether, but that they left that church to find Jesus move clearly in another place, or church. What they did was not deconstruct the faith. They are shedding beliefs that have “barnacled” themselves to evangelicalism in a way that makes them central and necessary. The deconstructors went through pain, turmoil, and the realization that they might lose friends and their stabilizing community in order to maintain their integrity about what it means to follow Jesus. There are too many for whom “deconstruction” means shedding elements of cultural evangelicalism. Let’s listen to them.
David Zahl cites in his 2019 book Seculosity, fewer than 10 percent of American parents in the 1950s would have objected to their child marrying someone from another political party. In 2010, that number surged to nearly 40 percent. Today, entire church congregations are turning over, resorting themselves according to shared political ideals.
Remembering your reading
If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”?
What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collinsfrom 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”
Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.” I want to believe that my immersion in the fascinating characters and rich plot of “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner are performing some kind of alchemy in my brain even if — and it seems unthinkable, halfway through the book — I am likely to forget it all.
Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, confirmed for Collins that inability to recall a book’s details shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we didn’t assimilate it in some way. “We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory,” she told him. “The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
Melissa Kirsch NYT
17th-century genius Thomas Browne: “Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.”
Envy
Envy is the dominant destructive emotion in most people. It’s a tricky emotion in that it can be both healing and lethal. A small dose can motivate a person to excel, but a large dose can lead a person to hop on an endless treadmill of chasing what they can never catch. It’s an addiction that only increasing amounts can satisfy and even then the satisfaction is fleeting and the hunger returns.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar
College Education
no college education is complete unless it trains students to ask the right questions about the relationship between their empirically based studies of the world around them and larger transcendent principles – including principles about God, the meaning of virtue, and the basis for objective truth.
If students don’t ask these questions, they’ll likely graduate from college with some excellent skills, but without the framework that equips them for a meaningful life. But if they do ask these questions, they will not only have the tools to see the connections between everything that they have learned but they will also gain the ability to apply that knowledge for something more meaningful than merely a personally enjoyable or financially lucrative career.
We often tell Jesus what we would do if we had a million dollars, but most don’t have a million dollars. Most of us do have a twenty in our pocket. Perhaps Jesus is interested in what we’ll do with the twenty we do have rather than the millions we don’t.
Mike Glenn
Given the choice of this moment or eternity, let me choose in this moment what is eternal. Given the choice of this easy pleasure, or the harder road of the cross, give me grace to choose to follow you, knowing that there is nowhere apart from your presence where I might find the peace I long for, no lasting satisfaction apart from your reclamation of my heart.
every holy moment
Living as a Mystic
You don’t have to enter a monastery to be a mystic. You don’t have to renounce chocolate or forsake pop culture. It is not necessary to take formal vows and beat yourself up when you inevitably fail to uphold them. These are static notions of what it means to be committed to the life of the soul, and they probably have almost nothing to do with the warm and spicy sprawl of your days. To be a mystic in our times is not about renunciation; it is about intention.
Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred. It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love. Contemporary wise woman Anne Lamott says (quoting Father Ed, the priest who helped Bill Wilson start up Alcoholics Anonymous) that “sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” [1] You know what it looks like when you wipe a lens clean of smears and dust. And you also know how it feels to bump into the furniture when your vision is fuzzy. When you say yes to cultivating a mystical gaze, the ordinary world becomes more luminous, imbued with flashes of beauty and moments of meaning. The universe responds to your willingness to behold the holy by revealing almost everything as holy. A plate of rice and beans, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, your new baby, the latest political scoundrel, the scary diagnosis, the restless nights.
You can start right here, in the middle of your messy life. Your beautiful, imperfect, perfect life. There is no other time, and the exact place you find yourself is the best place to enter. Despite what they might have taught you at Bible Camp or in yoga class, you are probably not on your way to some immaculate state in which you will eventually be calm and kindly enough to be worthy of a direct encounter with the divine. Set your intention to uncover the jewels buried in the heart of what already is. Choose to see the face of God in the face of the bus driver and the moody teenager, in peeling a tangerine or feeding the cat. Decide. Mean it. Open your heart, and then do everything you can to keep it open. Light every candle in the room….
Mirabai Starr via CAC.org
We are STUPID!
Prov. 12: 15Stupid people always think they are right. Wise people listen to advice. (GNT)
Wise people are really aware of how often they are wrong. Even when they are right they feel a sense of wrong.
Stupid people always think they are right. They never have to justify their actions. They never have to justify their choices because they think they’re right. If you are always right you’re not always right, you’re always stupid.
By choosing to listen you begin to attack the stupidity in your life. Wise people listen to counsel. You never get so wise that you do not need advise.
Stupid people think that wise people don’t need advise. And that’s why they are stupid. Wise people need less advice and want it more. Wise people need less advice and seek it more. Stupid people need more advice and seek it less.
Here’s how to know where you fall on the spectrum of stupid or wise. If you are asking people for counsel and input in your life you are wise. If you are looking for people that agree with you, you are being stupid. Ironically, stupid people always pretend they are getting advice. Erwin McManus
Being a Christian
To be a Christian in the proper sense, to worship God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is to acknowledge that our life does not have its source in ourselves, but in God. Living by this, moment by moment, is what it means to have a true and authentic existence – to be truly human.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Reverberation from the Echo Chamber
…an unfortunate and largely unintended consequence of the rise of social media is that instead of being better informed and exposed to ever-broadening viewpoints, research shows that Americans today are more polarized and draw from shrinking pools of news. R. Sunstein
Over the past decade or more, government and society in general has become more polarized. People’s ability (willingness) to communicate with those who do not share views/beliefs has become endanger. There is general agreement echo chambers are a significant factor contributing to the state our society. Technology has unleashed the malevolent potential of echo chambers in ways never imagined. Echo chambers are ubiquitous. Social media, news outlets, blog feeds, churches, families, neighborhoods, communities. If there is a context where differences exists, a “safe room” (echo chamber) will emerge and like-minded people will seek refuge. Echo chambers are personally relevant. Recognizing I was residing in a self imposed political/social echo chamber, I made a decision to dampen the echoes and open myself to different sources. Those efforts met with mixed success. The likelihood of trading one echo chamber for another is real. The decision became a catalyst for more serious thought and investigation into the character and nature of echo chambers. The Echo Chambers essay is an attempt to share questions, ideas and issues encountered related to echo chambers.
Echo Chambers – an impetus for evil.
The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin in because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world. Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul, we shall be lost. How can we do this unless we are willing to look at our own evil ? M. Scott Peck – People of the Lie
[“Reverberation from the Echo Chamber” ; excerpts from an essay entitled “Echo Chambers” written in 2018. You can read the complete essay HERE.]
…the saying in the Sesotho language is: Motho ke Motho ka Batho. A person is only human in relation to other humans.
…as a Christian the idea of self sufficiency is close to anathema. How else do we live the Christian life except in the context of the faith community as we engage the world around us?
Keith Regehr
role of God in mental health
I don’t think you can grow tomatoes by praying for them to appear out of thin air. There is this thing called gardening that God gave us to grow and cultivate tomatoes. In a similar way, God gave us technologies that promote mental health and well-being and it would be foolish not to use these when needed. And yet, I also think it’s a mistake to ignore the role faith and spirituality plays in psychological well-being. As I describe in The Shape of Joy (due out in about two weeks), one of the best kept secrets of psychology is that faith and spirituality have been repeatedly shown to be predictive of health and happiness. God is good for you.
This isn’t to say we should approach God in a therapeutic, utilitarian manner. I know a lot of pastors and theologians who worry about reducing God to “the therapeutic.” I tend to respond to this concern with Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. If God is our Creator and the ground of our being then it stands to reason that we’ll thrive when we make contact with and abide in that ground. Mental health improves when psychology makes contact with ontology. Living in the real matters.
Ethics are formed. We are not born able to naturally make ethical decisions for the good of others. Have you ever seen a group of toddlers play? “Mine!” and “No!” are phrases that characterize the toddler years. Nor do we coincidentally happen upon becoming a virtuous person. The process by which ethics, and therefore character, is the academic study that spiritual formation engages in.
Kelly Edminson
Contemplation
Parker Palmer writes, “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality.”
Contemplation is any way we can find to help us penetrate illusion and touch reality—and reality will always be bigger than us. It will always leave us a bit uncomfortable, a bit off center stage. If we’re still on center stage, it isn’t Reality.
Richard Rohr
Famine
Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.
Nicholas Kristof NYT
A convenient rationale for euthanasia:
“The patient is mercifully put out of our misery.” G Ezell
Remembering your reading
If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”?
What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collins from 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”
Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.” I want to believe that my immersion in the fascinating characters and rich plot of “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner are performing some kind of alchemy in my brain even if — and it seems unthinkable, halfway through the book — I am likely to forget it all.
Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, confirmed for Collins that inability to recall a book’s details shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we didn’t assimilate it in some way. “We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory,” she told him. “The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
Melissa kirsch NYT
Envy
Envy is the dominant destructive emotion in most people. It’s a tricky emotion in that it can be both healing and lethal. A small dose can motivate a person to excel, but a large dose can lead a person to hop on an endless treadmill of chasing what they can never catch. It’s an addiction that only increasing amounts can satisfy and even then the satisfaction is fleeting and the hunger returns.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar
A Good Story
Let this be said: evangelicalism loves a good conversion or spiritual life story. Let this be added quickly: but only so long as the story confirms the boundary lines.
Scot McKnight
Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Today’s post introduces what is planned to be a regular feature in SMTTA. “Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”. I will share excerpts from an essay entitled “Echo Chambers” written in 2018. You can read the complete essay HERE.
“Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”
Who are we?
My hope is readers will gain an awareness of echo chambers. More importantly, readers will better understand personal implications of residing in an echo chamber. This is not about Republican or Democrat, et al. It is not about giving up what we believe to be right. It is not about proving the other side wrong. It is ultimately irrelevant whether we are right or wrong about our cause. Continual, unfiltered reinforcement of our rightness, will, ironically, result in unhealthy outcomes that can result in destructive consequences. It is revealing to read comments on controversial subjects that appear in social media. There is no limit as to how despicable comments can be. Living constantly in an echo chamber can transform us in ways that are inexplicable. The “safety” of an echo chamber is a darkness that shields us from face to face interaction and allows us to escape responsibility and grants permission for words and conduct that we would never consider otherwise.
Consider two comments posted recently on Linkedin I believe illustrate the point:
Bull@#$% comments from trolls or morons are completely useless and waist of my time to read. I am not neatral in what i am.I stand without doubt a hardcore constitutional republican ,a Master automotive technician, and above all a christian. So call me what you want i am confident in my beliefs, ideas and religion.What the naysayers have to say has ZERO EFFECT ON ME and makes no difference to anyone but the one calling names.
… we should all support each other…men ,women and others.we are all gods children.lets stop dividing ourselves into categories.men ,women, black ,white straight ,gay.lets just be one people with the same mission.being good citizens of our wonderful country.I agree that women should not put down other women nor should any group denounce other groups just to self promote or to attack others you dont agree with.Lets debate and find common ground and work together for the greater good for all.
The first comment was, obviously, in response to a subject a commenter did not agree with. The second comment came in response to an idea a commenter agreed with.
The most revealing thing about these two comments is that the author of both was the same person. I wonder which one he would say most represents who he is??
