Opinionated

I am spend­ing much of the day mak­ing “True or False” tests from a cou­ple of read­ing assign­ments for a col­lege course I am teach­ing. Stu­dents that have taken my classes before smile when they take the tests. They know that many of the ques­tions can be answered either way. I am more inter­ested in get­ting stu­dents to think than I am of get­ting them to merely hand back pieces of pre-digested infor­ma­tion. It is fun to see the expres­sions on their faces as they stum­ble into ques­tions that present dilem­mas that can be answered either “True” or “False.” (They must defend their answers sufficiently.)

We live in an era that is hun­gry for absolutes. This is noth­ing ter­ri­bly new. Peo­ple have always been uncom­fort­able with the abstract, the mys­te­ri­ous, or with issues that have an end­less num­ber of vari­ables — none of which are com­pletely clear. Stu­dents of all ages just want to fin­ish the test, get their pass­ing grade, and go out­side to play. My job is to get them to think for them­selves — to chal­lenge the views pre­sented in any text­book. Peo­ple are more than walk­ing dic­tio­nar­ies or infor­ma­tion robots. Par­rot­ing infor­ma­tion takes no real thought at all. Infor­ma­tion and idiocy are the same if not sent through a think­ing mind.

What appears as strength is really weak­ness. Beat­ing the drum from one horn of the dilemma or the other is for the imma­ture. These folks are all cap­i­tal­ist or social­ist, all one polit­i­cal party or the other, and they always have the defin­i­tive answer to any and all issues (no mat­ter how great or small). A mature per­son lives in the ten­sion between the extremes. It is not an easy place to reside. There is much work to be done there. Addi­tional research means that a per­son must choose and choose again. This takes time and effort. It is also a threat to an imma­ture ego that can­not han­dle the sting of pos­si­bly being wrong. Think­ing is more than cheer­ing one intel­lec­tual par­a­digm or another onto some sort of opin­ion end zone.

Smiles and smirks tell me which church mem­bers are truly lis­ten­ing. No doubt Jesus’ para­bles caused a lot of peo­ple to scratch their heads and pon­der what all he might have meant. Wrestling with his teach­ings is the point. Spir­i­tu­al­ity is the strug­gle of mind, body, and soul in a world of the illu­sive, the abstract, and the ever-receding mys­ter­ies of the universe.

Think about it.