In 1978, Jim Jones poisoned almost one thousand of his followers in Guyana.  “Jones saw the handwriting on the wall, and the words spelled nuclear war,” I wrote in a published letter in TIME.  “So, choosing to march to a different drumbeat, Jones’ disciples followed him into the jungle.  Their humanistic dream: to build a better world.  But, as it turned out, the handwriting was a forgery, the drummer was mad, the humanism bankrupt, and the dream a nightmare.”   During our honeymoon in 1993, cultist David Koresh immolated 84 of his followers at Waco, Texas.  This charismatic zealot convinced his followers that his truth was true, and because of that they perished.  In 1997, 39 members of Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate UFO cult killed themselves.  Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite shared a belief in God and Jesus and called themselves Christians.  They were men of faith, and the people who killed themselves were people of faith.  There are some things that I take on faith, and in the absence of evidence and reason.  These include belief in God, belief that Jesus is God, and belief in a soul.  But we can get ourselves into fatal trouble when we act on excess of blind faith, as did those who died in the Branch Davidian compound, at Jonestown and at Rancho Santa Fe. One way that we can test propositions that lack factuality is to on their outcome.  “By their fruits ye shall know them” is a practical principle.  In the case of Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite, their apocalyptic delusions brought death.

        A good principle is that when extraordinary claims are made of any kind, the burden of evidence must rest on those making the claims and evidence supporting those claims should be correspondingly extraordinary.  And for this reason, I would encourage you to be economical in extending your faith to whatever claims come your way.

        Another of my rules is to never show blind faith in anyone.  This includes politicians, teachers, church workers, and colleagues.  But it also includes us.  We can be your own worst enemy as we can fool ourselves in thinking that we can do or know more than we really can.   Robert Burns wrote a poem on how we can be self-deluded when he observed an “ugly, creepin” roach promenading on the bonnet of an oblivious woman in church:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

             An’ foolish notion.

A frank appreciation of our own weaknesses can help us develop compensating strengths, much like a blind person who develops acute hearing.  For example, my handwriting is poor, so I became a skilled typist.  My memory is bad, but I’ve good organizational skills and always carry around a journal to capture thoughts before they flutter away forever.   My social skills are weak, so I married Nancy.

         A corollary to this rule is to never show blind faith in an “ism”.  Communism and Fascism are bandwagons of the past, and other ideologies, some of which may have religious colorations, will make their entrance in the future.   “Faith is a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves,” Hoffer writes. Don’t lose yourself in fanaticism, for the fires of faith will consume you as they have countless others before you.   Try to determine what is true for yourself.  Never submerge yourself in a single vision or a single personality.

       Avoid intellectual isolationism.  Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite were able to manipulate their followers by keeping them physically and mentally isolated from the mainstream of society.  It’s the first step taken in the brainwashing process.  You need to fight this by engaging with the widest variety of opinions that you can.  There is no intrinsic truth in the broad marketplace of ideas.  Everyone, after all, could be mistaken.  However, it does provide an additional reality check on your thinking by exposing you to ideas and options that you perhaps had not considered.   It’s important to seek out and engage in a dialectic that ekes out the truth, just as adversarial lawyers do in a courtroom.  And sometimes the only way you can do that is by exposing yourself to opinions that on face seem disagreeable or false.      

        A final rule is if a claim can be demonstrated using evidence, then it must be dismissed, unless evidence supports that claim.   I’ll use my youngest boy to show you what I mean with this made-up conversation. 

       “Daddy, guess what,” Ben says.  “We talked about angels in Sunday school today!”

       “That’s nice,” I say.

        Sometime later, he comes running in from outside.  “Daddy, daddy, there are angels on our roof!”

         “My boy, I better see angels flapping their wings outside or I’m going to have to make an appointment for you with Dr. Gold tomorrow!” 

        This little story suggests the distinction between beliefs that may or may not be true and beliefs that we can and must test using our senses, accumulating tangible, demonstrable evidence—not anecdotes or testimony but hard facts that can disarm the most relentlessly skeptical inquiries.  The absence of angels on my roof doesn’t mean that no angels exist.  However, since the claim has been made, the claim should be tested.  Our senses can deceive us as we know from dreams, hypnosis, and mirages.  But it’s always better to test what can be tested than to embrace a testable but untested claim.

Copyright © 2006 My Mall & News
About | Site Map | Archives | Home