Still Thinking !

Still Thinking !

I have been away from the blog for a couple of months, OK I got lazy!!!

Now I'm back … but there is still this niggling problem in my mind :

THE BIG PROBLEM

As Jeremiah said : “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (17:9)

The problem is us! Or more precisely two human traits ; First is the capacity of the human mind to interpret data to mean what the person wants to be the case; Second is our ability to fool ourselves that we are being righteous when in fact we are being devious deceitful and dishonest!

I was watching a TV documentary on an oil rig disaster in the gulf of Mexico which caused huge environmental damage and killed the crew on duty in the 'drilling shed' on the drilling platform. As one expert commented: the men did not want to die, but they were under extreme pressure to complete the job, so they really wanted the test they were conducting to show that it was safe to pull up the drill. But the test 'failed' so they tried another way of measuring if the iol well was going to leak. This way indicated that it was OK. But as the expert pointed out, the gauge readings they were looking at still showed a discrepancy that should have alerted them to the fact that something was wrong. (actually the second test only looked like a 'pass' because of another fault!).

So the crew interpreted the data in front of them – maybe quite unconsciously – how they wanted it to be rather than how it really was. In their case they paid for their mistake with their lives!

My point is, as I said way back in my last post, people – normal well meaning people – still often see what they want to see in the Bible. So how do we use it as the standard of ethics?

The second human trait compounds this problem. Again Jeremiah said it: “How can you say, “We are wise,for we have the law of the Lord,” when actually the lying pen of the scribes has handled it falsely? (8:8)

I was one time, as a young engineer, sitting in on a test to see if certain machinery performed as specified. The manufacturer and the customer were running the test, we were the umpires. As our senior engineer quipped: “Sure figures can't lie – but liars can figure!” That quote stuck in my mind.

It is a matter of history that bad people have justified doing bad things with some catch phrase taken from the scriptures. It is also a matter of (even recent) history that churches have even in a single lifetime changed their dogma on what they say the Bible teaches on a particular subject. So once again how do we use the Bible as the standard of ethics?

I believe there must be an answer. I expect it is something along the lines that I was exploring in the last few blogs. But I think the problem is so big and so fundamental to the whole exploration of ethics that I am going to try to untangle a few strands of it!

I started on the Ten Commandments, and in particular the “No Murdering” one. I am still taking that topic, but doing something different with it.

I was thinking I could go through the Bible and extract a holistic paradigm on killing. Two problems: Firstly that soon turned out to be biting off much more than I could chew! Secondly as outlined above – who is to say that my interpretation is not just me making the data fit my pre-conceived ideas, or worse performing some clever sleight of hand to make people believe what I want them to believe!

So I am going to take two or three instances where this command has been the subject of controversy, and where the church has, in my lifetime, done a complete turn around. I am hoping this will sharpen our appetite for searching the Bible and help us to have the right sort of scepticism.

Next post I will tackle ….. Ah! That would be telling – tune in again to find out!