Sudden Thoughts
This is an out of series update after I had a sudden thought that interested me. Instead of letting it run around inside my head for days, weeks or until I forgot about it, I decided to write it down and see what came of it. Through the magic of technology this allows you to think about it too. I hope you do. This post contains thoughts on religion but its not a commentary on religion, it’s to make a further point. Please stick with it if you can, I think it’s important in understanding our current world situation.
The Religious Bit
Anyone who knows me well will know I’m not religious, as a younger man I went through stages of atheism that I imagine many do. Suspicion, internal disbelief, overt disbelief and then angry opposition. Shortly after that though I realised I didn’t actually care. Why am I telling you this? It’s important to understand that my life was lived in Greater London, where would I find or need a God?
Nearly 15 years ago I moved to Australia, we lived - as almost all Australian’s do - about an hour from absolutely nowhere. One of the most glorious things about Australia, is that where ever you are in the country, you can jump in the car and drive for an hour and be in the middle of nowhere and with no-one in sight.
One day I did exactly that as part of my job, driving nearly 3 hours out into the countryside. After the job, on the way back home I decided to stop the car in the middle of a particularly pretty landscape, jump out and take some photos. There wasn’t a house in sight and no vehicles had passed me in an hour.
The moment I jumped out I had a sudden thought, I have absolutely no idea how cars work, nor any idea what to do if they stop working. I was in an area with no phone signal and no one knew where I was. What would happen to me if the car didn’t start when I jumped back in?
Suddenly I understood why God might be a comfort in the correct context.
If my car hadn’t started, or I’d tripped over and hurt myself, got lost or been bitten by something - I would be in serious trouble. Living out alone in this kind of harsh landscape - particularly in years gone by - would have been a constantly stressful life. One wrong move, one wrong step, an unexpected illness and you are at least a day away from rescue and very likely to end up dead. It must be a great comfort to think that God will look after you, it would take away that constant stress believing that someone out there - bigger than the landscape - is looking after you.
In my upbringing in London however, God made no sense at all, spending all day mere moments from hospitals, travel and healthcare available 24hrs a day, phones, weather warnings, safety barriers, who needs someone to look after you when you have all that?
This thought process made me realise that God could be contextual. In a bad situation an infallible, all-seeing, kindly protector is an absolute blessing, whereas surrounded by the comforting lights of a city, with healthcare on call its not really something you’d give a second thought. When I lived in London I would not have understood the thoughts I had standing in the middle of nowhere in Australia.
In a Kingdom of man made comfort, safety and protection, why would you need God?
Charismatic Germans
I told you at the start this wasn’t a religious post and it isn’t. I’m still not religious but I understand a little bit more about those people that are and entirely respect their faith. The important thing to realise is that context is everything, that a change of surroundings can entirely change your way of thinking.
Now let’s look at our current situation, where it seems that everyone thinks ‘half the world has gone mad’.
It’s clear that there are deep divides in thinking around the world. For example, a large group of people believe that the 2020 election result was suspicious, whereas another - probably equally large - group of people with the opposite viewpoint think the same about the 2016 election result. Similarly there are deep divides in thinking around Coronavirus and its’ associated changes to our way of life.
There should be people winning the argument, there should be people changing their minds, particularly since we have the greatest access to information the world has ever seen. Yet instead we have deeply entrenched sides and we seem to be getting more divided not less, why is that?
Could it be that because we are literally surrounded by information we are starting to lose the ability to actually think?
Let me give you a very specific example of something we’ve lost.
In the 1990’s during a visit from some friends, one of them mentioned a TV program we used to watch often. It was called ‘The Great Egg Race’. It was a successful program on a minor channel, and hosted by a slightly peculiar, though very charismatic German professor.
During the conversation about The Great Egg Race, all of us - 5 people - were desperately trying to remember the name of the charismatic German. We just couldn’t get it. We went through all the people we thought it might be, we went through people who had been on the show, we tried starting with names beginning with ‘A’ and working our way up. We shouted incorrect guesses at each other only to be howled and jeered at. Nothing, we couldn’t remember. Mentally tired and ever-so-slightly drunk we went our separate ways and called it a night. Returning to our homes, still with a little bit of our brains thinking through names and struggling with the lost memory.
At four am (passed out on the couch, if you’re interested) I become aware of an irritating noise that turned out to be the house phone ringing. A phone call - an actual call on a home telephone - at 4am in the morning was never a good noise, and even more rarely good news.
I woke quickly, wiped away some dribble and holding back a tiny bit of vomit and wincing from a hangover that was only halfway through forming - quickly answered the phone, worried that someone had died.
A voice at the other end of the line yelled triumphantly “IT’S HEINZ F*&*KING WOLFF!”.
So the mystery was solved, the name of the charismatic German was retrieved from a memory and to be completely honest at four o’clock in the morning it didn’t seem as important as it had the night before.
The important part of this story however is the mental effort that had gone into the retrieval, 5 people, spending mental hours searching for a name, trying different tricks and alleyways of the mind to bring it back, arguing back and forth with incorrect ideas and eventually finding a way and being sure it was correct because everyone agreed and had exhausted all other options.
What would happen now in this situation?
We would have a chat, a question would be asked about who the German was and someone would look it up on Google. The answer would come back immediately and it could easily be correct, however it would just as easily be wrong if someone looked up the wrong series of the TV program, or someone on the internet had made a mistake. In this situation half of us would have been unfulfilled with the answer, still puzzling over what it should have been, while the others could have been entirely happy.
The mental work had not been put in, the result was certainly not as satisfying and the answer was questionable. Imagine how interested you would be in the correct answer 12 hours later if your friend had not let it go? Imagine how you would feel about your friend being arrogant enough to distrust the internets answer and what you would feel about them searching for little known, lesser websites that might produce the correct answer.
And so I wonder, are we getting stupider because we are surrounded by information? If our requirements are contextual then in a Kingdom full of information, why do you need to think?
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