I wonder if it’s possible to convince anyone of anything that he doesn’t already want to believe.
I go on and on here about bogus Global Warming, creeping statism, and the defects of public education, among other things–but have I ever written anything that changed anybody’s mind? Probably not.
So how do minds get changed? I don’t know; but I’ll tell you about something that changed my mind in a big way, long ago.
Like most of who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, I came to view Science as an unadulterated blessing–minus the contributions of mad scientists you see in horror movies–and scientists as the most trustworthy people in America. The moon landing in 1969 seemed to confirm the faith we had in science.
Then I took a biology course in college.
Toward the end of the semester, after they’d covered everything else, the lecturers in the Rutgers Biology Dept. took some weeks to present their vision for the future–which to me looked like some kind of human ant-hill in which we would all be micro-managed by Experts in every sphere of life.
I wasn’t the only one in the class who didn’t like that vision. Boy, I wish I had those lectures on tape! Finally someone was moved to ask, “But what about freedom and individuality?”
To which the lecturer replied, “Those are obsolete concepts that must be engineered out of the system.”
That changed my mind about science. To this day I continue to suspect them of trying to make their vision a reality, with a little help from their friends in politics.
No one argued me out of my view of science. All I had to do was hear the lectures.
So maybe I haven’t convinced anyone of anything. All I can say is, I’ve given it a try. Also, I just have to protest some of this stuff or my head will explode.
My advice is simply this. Listen to what the big shots say, and watch what they do. Sooner or later some of you will realize what they’re up to.
I only caught on to the the game, starting with the first war against Iraq. At that time I was about 52 years of age, so for a long time I was at the bottom of the knowledge tank The internet has helped, but cement heads cannot/will not learn.
Dave
I guess I’ve always been a skeptic, because I have always taken a “wait and see” position when any new idea came along. It has not won any friends for me; in fact, I am considered cynical, a curmudgeon, and other things. I don’t really care. Years ago, in middle school, for some reason a discussion began among the “erudite” 12 and 13 year olds who thought males were just naturally better than females. Hah! I said, “what does that matter to me, what other people think? I know what I think, end of discussion.”
Does that make me one of the “stone heads” or is it safe to continue my way of looking at things? I honestly do not know.
We know you’re not a stone-head, Erlene! Otherwise you wouldn’t be on this blog.
Maybe that’s the answer, then! Just let the talking heads rattle on and on; they always slip up and say what they really think. Always.
That’s exactly what Hercule Poirot would say. And I have a friend who’s a homicide detective, who says the same. The bad guys always blab, eventually.
They nearly all are evil and cannot be trusted any further than you can throw them. They post foolish ideas … like non-life from life, which is not only stupid but violates all the maxims of real science like the THREE LAWS OF THERMO-DYNAMICS … concepts which can be proven in any experiment in any living room in America.
My take on this is that knowledge doesn’t equate to good judgement. Knowledge applied with poor judgement can result is some very poor conclusions. The wild success of America sprang from its goodness and fear of God. Now that these things are no longer as broadly practiced, we have opened ourselves up to some very bad results.
We never know when something we’ve said plants, if not a full-blown idea in someone’s mind, at least a seed, an uneasiness with the ideas already there. In the heat of argument, it’s hard to back down, but later on, the idea we’ve fought against starts clicking with other ideas or some external evidence we might not have noticed before…. That’s happened to me a number of times in my life, and I’ve often wished I could go back five or ten years (or more!) and tell the person I argued with or brushed off impatiently, “I’ve come to realize you were right.”
Actually, one of my fondest memories of the Good Old Days in academe was the time I got into a knock-down drag-out debate with a colleague during dinner at a professional conference, went back to my hotel room still fuming, and then suddenly realized, “Wait a minute, she’s right.” The next morning I saw her at breakfast, and we both said in unison, “I think you were right.” Then we laughed, hashed out where we still disagreed, and kept arguing. Alas, you don’t get that kind of camaraderie and search for truth in academe any more.
Anyway, Lee, who knows? … You may have planted some of those seeds, or, to go back to your original metaphor, made a hairline crack in the cement which will one day widen to admit a new idea.
Ludwig von Mises taught that most people live by the values they were educated with. What we have to do is further people’s education. That is the purpose of this blog “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Because of reading material like on Lee’s blog, we become better armed when teaching moments present themselves where we can sow seeds of Scriptural truth into the minds of public school educated people.
Gonna be hard to live up to that, but I’ll try. Pray for me to say the right things.