The importance of pop quizzes

You’ve just noticed several people carrying signs that say “Down with Ice Cream.”   You approach them to ask what is so bad about ice cream.  After listening to them for a few minutes, it becomes clear to you that there is a misunderstanding.  To them, the phrase “ice cream” actually means kicking dogs.  They are against kicking dogs. 

“Oh, you mean that you’re against kicking dogs?” you ask.

“Down with ice cream!” they nod.

It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation without a common understanding of the words being used.  “Evolution” is a good example.   When I hear someone speaking disparagingly about evolution I can trigger the following exchange:

Q:  What’s so bad about evolution?

A: It’s just a theory (#1) that says that everything here is just an accident (#2) and that people came from monkeys (#3).

Zero for three, every time.  In short, most people who “oppose” evolution are against something other than the scientific theory of evolution.  Further, most anti-evolutionists I’ve encountered don’t know what scientists say about evolution and don’t care [Good places to learn what scientists think would be here and here.]

The irony is that most people who oppose evolution are not opposed to any of the major facts upon which evolution is based (e.g., that random mutations occur, that some of these mutations make organisms more likely to survive long enough to bear offspring, or that a parent’s traits tend to be passed on to its children).  In fact, opponents don’t usually …

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Is It Important or Simply Well Attended?

Tens of thousands of people flow into the stadium in anticipation of the big game.  Thousands more people read about the “big” game in the following day’s paper.  The headline: “46,239 Fans Attend Big Game.” But would that big game be “big” if only a few people showed up?  Or…

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Be Conscious of Your Unconscious to Set you Free

A lot of people are beating up on old Sigmund Freud these days.  More than a century ago, however, Freud hit a particular ball out of the park and it’s still sailing:  he concluded that many important thought processes are unconscious. 

In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Mark Johnson and George Lakoff listed some of the many important unconscious mental activities:

  • Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.
  • Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features.
  • Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context.
  • Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole.
  • Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion.
  • Making inferences relevant to what is being said.
  • Constructing mental images where relevant.
  • Filling in gaps in the discourse.
  • Noticing and interpreting a speaker’s body language.

In short, most of what is going on in our heads is unconscious. Lakoff and Johnson concluded that “unconscious thought is at least 95 percent of all thought and that our unconscious conceptual systems function like a “hidden hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience.  It constitutes our unreflective common sense.”

Nietzsche expressed this same idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra: 

“It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”

Freud and Nietzsche have been proven absolutely correct on this point.  That consciousness is only the “tip of the iceberg” has been conclusively proven by hundreds of experiments outlined in numerous …

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On Asking a Very Smart God to Change His Ways

Why Pray?  Perhaps my previous post sounded a bit harsh.  Why “mock” those who call upon their Creator for a bit of help in a time of need? Skeptics have obvious reasons for doubting the power of prayer, but it seems to me that Believers should have even stronger reasons…

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What Did Jesus Look Like? What Would Jesus Do?

Unfortunately, no one took His photograph.  Had they done so, Jesus wouldn’t have had a prayer recruiting most of his potential followers.  It is hard to imagine western Europeans falling in love with a dark-skinned Savior from the Middle East, especially a Jewish one.

For many centuries, Western Europeans haven’t paid meaningful attention to dark-skinned writers, musicians, painters, architects, teachers, politicians or philosophers.  In fact, they’ve openly discriminated against anyone who didn’t look “European.”  Nor would Jesus have had much of a chance today (“Hey, isn’t he one of those guys who attacked us on 9/11?”). We certainly wouldn’t tolerate any dark-skinned man who told us to give up our extravagant (i.e., suburban) lifestyles.

Because there are no photographs, Believers have had much artistic license to imagine Jesus in comforting ways.  Jesus always resembles the people who believe in Him.  He likes the things they like.  He feels their pain when they don’t get asked out to the prom.  He cries for them when they don’t get that promotion.  He applauds if we finish assembling the best Christmas lighting display on the block (He shouts “Way to Go!” and gives us the thumbs-up.). 

But most strikingly, even though His Believers don’t resemble each other, Jesus physically looks like each of them.  That’s how He looks in their dreams and prayers, as well as in publicly displayed art. 

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