To Be Human

Have you ever stood on a stage and looked at the different colored lights that are available to set a scene?   Changing a hue changes an atmosphere.  The lights are different colors, not because the inside of the light is different, but because of the filter covering the light.  There is no such thing as bias-free.  It is a myth of gigantic proportion.  The end result being that each religious or political group is absolutely convinced their views are the right views and others are either horribly mistaken or downright evil.

So here I sit with my Bible in hand.  The light that floods from its pages flows through the biased filter of my mind.  In order to change me, I have to be jolted otherwise my biases will adapt what I read.  What I read will merge with what I already believe.  In order for God to recruit Saul into Paul, God had to literally knock him off his horse and strike him temporarily blind to jolt Saul into a reevaluation of his core beliefs.  Even then Saul\Paul retreated for literally years of study before he emerged as Paul, Christ’s greatest ever evangelist.

Before we take up arms, verbal or otherwise, against anyone either for religious or political reasons, we must step back and recognize that we could be that other person were it not for the filtered set of biases we inherited from our past, our subculture and culture.   We must understand the other is as spiritually or philosophically invested as are we.  The cause for which we are willing to die is heresy to another.  It does not make them evil.  It makes them human.

Written by Roger Bothwell on January 21, 2014

Spring of Life, PO Box 124, St. Helena, CA 94574

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