Freedom and thinking for yourself
Outsourcing our thinking has made us slaves
Over the last few years I’ve encountered the same phenomenon time and again: Whenever I’ve been talking about things going on in the world or in the church, people almost always defer to an authority figure. Or at least, to ‘the authorities’, even if not to a particular person. You can see this happening in the secular world as well as the church.
For example, when trying to talk to people about all the evils of covid and the vaccines etc, most of the time people meet my arguments with a shrug of the shoulders. They don’t produce any real counter-arguments, it’s more a resignation that they don’t understand these things and they don’t really want to understand. And they probably think, “Phill’s a bit over-the-top here, it all sounds a bit too fantastic, so I’ll just quietly ignore what he says.” They’re not looking at the evidence or thinking for themselves about it — many people are simply not interested.
It’s the same in the church. A few weeks ago my wife and I were talking to a couple of leaders from a Christian group that my children went to. We had a few concerns about what they were teaching, and we asked them if we could talk about it. Once again, there was a similar dynamic: they listened politely to what we said, but there wasn’t any real engagement with our concerns. They certainly didn’t answer our objections with anything from the Bible. The idea that they could read the Bible for themselves and needed to hold even ministers to account was alien to them.
Sometimes I feel a bit like Agatha Christie’s Poirot:
‘If you would only use the brains the good God has given you. Sometimes I really am tempted to believe that by inadvertence He passed you by.’
— Lord Edgware Dies
I should make absolutely clear, I am not claiming any special intelligence or insight for myself apart from that which is common to us all: we should all be able to look at the evidence, use our brains, think for ourselves, and come to a rational conclusion. The fact that so many people are not is very worrying.
Being put to sleep
People like to talk about being ‘awake’ to what’s going on in the world, in contrast to those who are still unaware and ‘asleep’. I think the number of people who are awake is rising, but we do still seem to be in the minority. I’ve read that there are always going to be a certain number of people, around 10% of the population, who will question the status quo, but these are the minority.
That said, I think the fact that so many people are asleep at the moment is not a natural occurrence but has been deliberately engineered. I think the ‘powers that be’ have an interest in keeping us asleep, and have been waging a decades-long campaign to try and keep us sedated.
A whole variety of tactics have been employed, and many people have written about them at greater length and much more eloquently than myself. I will just run through a few of them briefly:
The illusion of a “left” vs “right” distinction in politics, which has been maintained despite the fact that all the mainstream parties now are effectively the same. This has kept people confused into believing that there is a material difference between the Conservatives and Labour. At the same time, loyalties to these parties are much more ‘tribal’ than they were — it serves the powers that be for our loyalties to be primitive / tribal, rather than thinking carefully about the issues involved and making a decision based on that.
The dumbing down of education. I think this has been one of the smartest moves they’ve made: a lot of young people are going on to further education and higher education, and from that perspective you might call it a success. But, on the other hand, education now is about accepting the facts that we are given as read, rather than thinking for ourselves. Education is actually a form of brainwashing to accept the status quo.
The dumbing down of just about everything else. For example, yesterday I was watching an interview with James Corbett and Vinnie Caggiano about how music has been dumbed down and what we can do about it. Even the music most people listen to these days is simplistic and nihilistic.
The elevation of ‘experts’. Many fields of knowledge have become specialised enclaves, and more and more of life has been taken over by these specialist enclaves. We tend to instinctively defer to experts in a these fields rather than analysing what they say and judging it against our own knowledge.
There’s much more that could be said here. The overall point is that I believe people have been intentionally put to sleep. At almost every point we have been discouraged from using our brains to think through important issues and encouraged to place our trust in experts who know better than us.
We’ve ended up with a society where people don’t like to think for themselves. They don’t trust their own thinking and judgement, they think that ‘experts’ will know best, and they would really prefer to avoid difficult and divisive topics.
A spiritual dimension
One of my favourite verses in the Bible is from the book of Romans:
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2
What I like about this is how Paul says that we are transformed by the “renewing of our minds”. In other words, our thinking is crucial to spiritual growth. People sometimes accuse Christianity of being anti-intellectual or the like, but this is the opposite of the truth. Christians are people who should be used to thinking, in fact they should set the benchmark! This is why countless intellectuals through the ages have been Christian, from famous scientists like Robert Boyle to philosophers such as Descartes. Not to mention thousands of works of art, music and literature inspired by Christianity.
One of the things I’ve been struck by as I’ve been plodding my way slowly through the history of the English Reformation is how revolutionary it must have been to have the Bible in English. The Catholics of the day fought tooth and nail against people having a Bible they could read for themselves. Just yesterday I read how Cranmer had sent portions of the English Bible to various bishops for their comment. Many of them did not want to comment. For example, Stokesley, bishop of London, replied like this:
“I do not understand my lord of Canterbury. By giving the people the Holy Scriptures, he will plunge them into heresy. I certain will not give an hour to such a task. Here, take the book back to my lord.”
The Catholic church of the day saw the Bible as dangerous, because it would lead to people … thinking for themselves. (Shock!! Horror!!) No longer would the Catholic church be able to teach doctrines such as purgatory and have people believe it uncritically. Rather, they would need to persuade people from the Scriptures. They — correctly — realised that to give people the Bible would be to take power away from the institution. That’s why they fought so hard against it.
It saddens me deeply today that, despite the fact that we have never had a time when it’s easier to access the Bible, many Christians don’t really understand it. It’s almost as if the reformation has been rolled back. Many Christians can’t read the Bible and put the pieces together.
Once again, this has been accomplished by some very clever strategies:
The ‘higher criticism’ movement, originating in 19th century Germany, saw many scholars doubting the words of the Bible as authentic — a trend which has continued in the academic world. Seeing the entirety of Scripture as inerrant and inspired by God is now very much a minority position in the academy, to put it mildly.
Issues such as the ordination of women and gay marriage have caused people to doubt their interpretation of the Bible. For example, since the early 1990s the Church of England has lived with ‘two integrities’ when it comes to the ordination of women — which, to my mind, is disingenuous.
Many churches preach the Bible in a purely intellectual sense — that is, the Bible leads to understanding Calvinism or some other doctrinal system. This may appeal to intellectually minded people, but is far from what God intended.
Other churches (and youth groups etc) take small bits of the Bible and take them out of context, rather than seeing it as a unified whole.
Although we have the Bible in English, and have done now for centuries, there are many ways today that people are discouraged from putting their faith in it. The upshot of all this is that people don’t trust the Bible — they don’t trust their interpration of the Bible, they are unsure about what it says, they don’t know how God wants them to live their lives.
If you read writers from centuries past such as John Owen, I find it striking how they seemed to have a grasp of the Scriptures in a way that many modern writers simply don’t. They saw the Bible as God’s authoritative word to us — if the Bible said it, it settled the matter. They didn’t simply intellectualise it, they believed it and sought to put it into practice. This is a far cry from the way it is today.
It’s hard to describe the problem unless you’ve seen it. I’d suggest anyone wanting to look into this for themselves have a read of older books such as Thomas Watson’s Body of Divinity or John Owen’s On the Mortification of Sin. I suggest you will find yourself more enlightened and brought closer to God by these works than you will by many modern books.
To finish with, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have lost confidence in our ability to think and reason at the same time as we have lost our confidence in the Scriptures.
The Noetic effect of sin
When I was at Bible college, I came across something called the noetic effect of sin. To put that into ordinary language, it means that sin has effected everything, including our ability to reason. Sin is not simply the bad things we do, but it affects everything about us. It shouldn’t therefore be a surprise that a society which turns away from God cannot reason correctly.
Let me quote from the Biblical scholar Douglas Moo:
It is also important to note that sin involves not just our actions; it is rooted in our very pattern of thinking. as we have seen, the sinful actions that humans commit (or the things that they sinfully fail to do) are the manifestation of a more fundamental condition – being “under sin.” And this condition, as we would expect, affects the mind. When people turned away from the knowledge of God, God “gave them over to a depraved mind” (Rom. 1:28). Their minds are hardened (2 Cor. 3:14); they are “darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them” (Eph. 4:18). They have a pattern of thinking, a mind-set, that is “set on earthly things” (Phil. 3:19; see Rom. 8:5-7). We should not be surprised, then, when non-Christians have trouble understanding things that seem very logical to us believers, such as that taking the life of a child in the womb is wrong or that labeling a homosexual union “marriage” is a fundamental category error. Non-Christians are incapable of thinking rightly about many such issues. A critical part of God’s new-covenant work, therefore, is the “renewing”” of the mind (Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:23). (Found via this page)
In a recent article I spoke about how those in the so-called ‘truth movement’ who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ demonstrate that they are not really seeking the truth.
Our ability to seek the truth is, I believe, related to our desire to seek God. It’s the same with our ability to reason. Without God, we can’t reason correctly. One of the things I keep coming back to on Sacred Musings is Solzhenitsyn’s words, “men have forgotten God. That’s why all this has happened.”
As we’ve forgotten God, we’ve lost our ability to think and reason — and that has led us to become slaves. Sin is slavery, and we can see that playing out in all sorts of ways. Fortunately, there is a cure. As Jesus says: “you will know the truth, and the truth set you free.” If we truly know Jesus and know the truth, we will be free. And that is the ultimate recipe for a free mind.
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