I have spent considerably less time online over the past 6 months than has been typical of me over the past few years. The convergence of studying/teaching, a healthy church, and plain old-fashioned busyness has redirected my energies and time in frenetic but also fruitful ways. One of the resets I am experiencing, albeit unexpectedly, is the mental reboot that takes place when you back away from something for a long time, and then re-engage with it.
The reality that what once sounded reasonable suddenly sounds bat *bleep* crazy is jarring. Which brings me to the point of this short post. Some of us realized a far ways back that the powers that be, the ones looking out for our health and safety, the people we are supposed to trust, were lying to us about 1,001 things. Everything from the differences between the sexes, to health advice, to what a real education looks like has been at best questionable, and at worst, outright lies and manipulations. Most of those who didn't know, well, they got a crash course in 2020. Crash courses, however, are rarely the best way to learn anything of importance. This goes double if, as is the case for the vast majority of Americans Christian and Non alike, you have not bothered to cultivate a coherent world view that resides outside of your personal feelings about a given issue; Something transcendent sourced from Someone outside of your own mind.
This brings me to the snippet of a blog post that I recently listened to on the way home from teaching my high school government class. It struck me immediately as true, so I was inspired to post it here for posterity.
There is also the stupidity of the ardent activist who took his very first red pill just six months ago, and who has no worldview framework for housing all of the things he has read in the course of those six months. When you go down the wormhole of web sites, it is hard to remember what you read where. Some of it was sane, some of it was responsible, some of it was what his grandfather tried to tell him a few times, and a bunch of it was just bat-guano crazy.
And if anybody tries to take him aside and explain to him just how crazy it is, that explainer has a steep hill to climb. This is because to be red-pilled at all is to struggle with the fact that you have been lied to about virtually everything your entirely life, and those lies were affirmed by the insider-stupidity guardians, all of them nodding solemnly. And let us be frank. The Establishment did lie, and more than a little bit. But it is no improvement to abandon your reliance on factory farm lies, and go out to the country in order chase down your free range lies.
Doug Wilson, Bat Guano Crazy*
Which is why there is no substitute for a coherent, preferably Biblical, worldview.
* This is not an endorsement of the entire post. Another blessing of a coherent, preferably Biblical worldview is that you don't demand 100% agreement with everything someone says to acknowledge that they just may have a point, and a good one even, about a few things.
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