I have to admit, I want to be right. Still, why do so many people strive to prove they are right no matter what other people say?
Desire to be right drives me to look for research on topics of interest. I look at what is said, how the research was done and who was directing the research. All of those things affect the results of the research.
Much has changed in terms of where we get our news. Mark Twain said, “If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”1 I think the same applies to electronic news outlets.
The only thing worse than being mis-informed is to be falsely informed. There’s a lot of that, especially on social media. Anyone can say whatever they want and claim it’s true. If you don’t take the time to check it out, then you will hear it as truth.
I think the tendency to believe and defend what we hear is a spiritual issue. By that I mean that we have to know ourselves if we are going to keep truth and fiction separated. When we don’t really know who we are, it is easy to be fooled into thinking we are whatever ideology is currently in vogue.
The founder of The Center for Action and Contemplation, Father Richard Rohr, points out in a book titled Dancing Standing Still that we tend to divide everything into two camps. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, Democrat and Republican.” Once we have decided which side we are on, we no longer consider any other position. Also, whatever the side we are on says, we have to accept all of it because it is “our” side.
The way to limit this influence is to know oneself and one way of doing that is contemplation. This is a practice that has a lot of myth around it but has been part of the spiritual life of the church as far back as we can go. Simply put, it is focusing so completely on something that everything else fades away. It could be a verse of scripture that becomes a focus. If it’s a verse of scripture, it’s best to focus on just the words of the scripture, not what they have been interpreted to mean.
There is a danger in contemplating things that are false or misleading. The truth can then fade away and not even be in one’s conscious mind any longer. In these cases, people become convinced they are totally right. This is one of the origins of religious pogroms that seek to kill anyone who has a different idea.
As we contemplate on the scripture and on the idea of who God is, we will inevitably discover more about who we are. The more we know about who we really are, who God made us to be, the less likely we will be drawn exclusively to one side or the other. We stop thinking in terms of “either/or” because we know ourselves and that we are a mixture of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, conservatism and progressiveness. All that really matters is that we be connected with God who is the source of all creation.
When you are hearing news, check it out with the scripture. Be careful, people can twist the scripture for their own purposes. But the more time we have spent in contemplating God and God’s word, the less likely we will be to be fooled.
- Attributed to Mark Twain by several sources but the original location is not known. ↩︎
Ross T Lucas 