Making Life Work #14

Years ago, I used to enjoy going up on internet forums and discussing religion there. They had any number of them divided up by category. I tended to hang out on the Christian forums. What was fascinating to me, and something I did not really understand, was the degree of hostility expressed on Christian forums. It seemed a good thing that these people were separated by the anonymity of the forum. If they had been in the same room, they might have come to blows. And I wondered, What generates so much hostility in some people of faith? Why is it that, when faced with a different belief, people don’t adopt one of two rational responses: indifference, or curiosity.

Indifference—when I encounter someone with an off-the-wall religious idea, I can tell quickly enough whether there is likely to be any merit there or not. If the answer is not, I toss it in the wastebasket or click my mouse and go somewhere else. If I am face-to-face with an adverse person, I have a stock reply. You may be right. I’ll give that some thought. And then I change the subject. Perhaps to the weather. Does that seem disingenuous? Not if you maintain an awareness that even you don’t have all the answers. And why get angry or hostile about it. That goes nowhere.

Curiosity—if I think there is merit, I want to know more, and so I pursue the matter. I may even pursue the matter when I disagree. If the person advancing the idea seems reasonable, well informed, intelligent, well then reason demands that I give him a hearing and try to understand him, even when I disagree with him. I discovered C.S. Lewis a little late in life, and I found that I sometimes disagreed with the man. This would not dismay Lewis in the least. But I never had any difficulty understanding why I disagreed because I tried to understand his point. When you think about it, what’s the point in only reading people you agree with?

Now, realizing that indifference and curiosity are reasonable responses, I wondered why some people found a third response—anger.

There are a lot of ways to mess up your life. It’s frightening how easy it is to make one small mistake that carries consequences that last a lifetime. There’s no way to avoid every mistake, and accidents will happen from time to time. But we can often be saved from those moments of reckless behavior by having a little wisdom.

The problem is that most people assume that knowledge is wisdom. Mere knowledge will not do the job. Some things are so tempting that just knowing better will not keep you out of it. Wisdom is more than knowledge. It includes a sense of right and wrong that helps you properly piece together knowledge to make the right decisions.

Let’s look at how King Solomon described this in Proverbs 5.

Life is all about challenges, and character is all about meeting those challenges. But the unfortunate thing is that most of us don’t really get a lot of instruction about how to meet them.

All too often, we instead indulge ourselves in attitudes and actions that have very unfortunate results. The problem is that we may not know it immediately. The results are delayed and are often cumulative. They build up on us over time and we don’t realize the damage we are doing.

The Book of Proverbs is absolutely filled with insights that couple a sense of right and wrong with practicality. Join me and we’ll take a look at a few examples that can help to make life work.

I suppose we would all agree that it’s a good thing to be wise. When you face hard decisions, it’s good to be able to decide which way is best. It would be good to have a power to discern what is true and right in all kinds of circumstances.

But do you have any idea how men get to be wise? Maybe it’s in the genes. Maybe it’s just luck. But what if it is not that way? What if there is something that makes the difference—something that you can do about being wise in any generation? What do you suppose that would be?

One thing we can do is to learn from the experience of others—of those who have gone before us and faced the same struggles. And this is what Solomon had in mind in his introduction to the Book of Proverbs.