When John Stewart recently interviewed Bill Clinton, the former president off handedly said that an ideologue is someone who makes up their mind before looking at the evidence.
In that one statement he summed up the way many people view issues today. They believe what they believe and the evidence be damned. You can believe global warming is a hoax, but the evidence says otherwise. You can believe voter fraud is a serious problem in this country, but the evidence says otherwise. You can believe gay marriage is a threat to the concept of marriage itself, but the evidence says otherwise.
Sometimes new evidence emerges that challenges current evidence, but until that happens, to believe what you believe before you consider any evidence is not having an opinion, it is stubbornly holding to an ideology.
This matters in every aspect of life, but none more so than religion, and that concerns me a lot. People believe what they believe when it directly contradicts the evidence. Consider the way people read the Bible. I often hear people say, ”The Bible says…” No it doesn’t. The Bible doesn’t ”say” anything except what people say it says, which may be correct and may be completely wrong. When I say the Bible says, in effect what I mean is the Bible says what I think it says. But it often doesn’t. Here is an example.
I can say the Bible is the Word of God, but the evidence doesn’t support that claim. We know for a fact that people wrote the Bible, and we also know that not one of them was God. So when I say the Bible is the Word of God I am saying something for which no evidence exists to support. Now, I may believe God gave the people who wrote it the words they wrote, but that is a belief and not a fact. Indeed, if I try to explain how that happened in a way that overrode all the human weaknesses that are part of being human, I will be hard pressed to do so. What is more, we know for a fact that there are some errors in the Bible that make believing God gave the writers the words to write even more complicated.
Certainly people have a right to believe what they want to believe, but that doesn’t make something true, and in many instances it proves they prefer ideology over evidence. Worse, I think it can do serious harm. For one thing, what people believe usually influences what they do, so believing something evidence says is not true is serious business. A lot of racism in my native Virginia was based on the belief that blacks were naturally inferior to whites. We saw where that got us.
But another thing ideological beliefs do is to make religion seem less attractive rather than more. If I had to believe the earth was ten thousand years old, that human beings and dinosaurs co-existed, that evolution is not true, that Jesus is coming back floating down from heaven on a cloud, and a host of other beliefs some Christians insists I should believe, I would not be a Christian. These ideological claims don’t make me want to be a Christian, they make me want to run away.
I wish there were a way to get ideologues to stop being afraid of evidence and realize that real truth, lasting truth, life changing truth can stand up to close scrutiny. It is simply not true that religious faith requires you to quit thinking, to refuse to study history, and to hide your eyes and close your ears to anything that challenges what you already believe. Someone wiser than I am once said that truth can set a person free (John 8:32). Whatever else he may have meant by that statement, I am quite sure he was not urging anyone to become an ideologue.
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Once again you have written a thought-provoking piece, Jan.
Very well said, Jan!
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Jan The ideologues would rather be dazzled with bulls**t than convinced with facts. Good blog.
I have crystalized this very problem with the statement: “Beware belief; it thwarts thought”. This issue is very personal to me as I am estranged from my son over “beliefs”. He has become so headstrong that his view or belief system, which is very conservative and protocol oriented, is right and proper that he tries to make everyone see things his way. I’ve labored arduously in discussions with him to see balance, but to no avail. He is relentless in his closed minded arguments to the point he is now estranged to his sister and most others in the family and everyone else thinking differently, more openly or inclusively. For him, as others of such ilk, idealogical thinking is most intense with regard to religion and politics; very black and white!
I’ve had to conclude that even before beliefs are formed there must be an innate mental attraction to certain concepts that lead to idealogical attachment and dismissal of further contemplation. I ask myself, “Why do certain ideas and concepts make sense to me, resonate?” There s something inside me that causes this; its not all rationality. The struggle for everyone is how to foster understanding among predisposed minds? This, I think, requires a wisdom to teach humility on a broad scale. Time and patience are paramount virtues in pursuing this path. We can’t quit on ourselves. I think God will give us the time to bring ourselves out of darkness.
I am sensing that we get confused about our belief systems, one can be associated with showing other people ways in which you are important. The focus in this belief system is getting your mental and emotional needs met, your ego. A belief were we hold on to stubborn and righteous views and delude ourselves that our own views are necessary ‘right’.
The other belief system has nothing to support or prove and wants only to remind us that we can live in peace, love, and abundance by accepting our non-grasping self, our spirit. It allows us to have access to a wide range of perspectives on any issue. Let’s think about this for a moment, what this can do for us. It will give us the ability to communicate and share ideas. We come to understand that there is no one single truth in the world. The truth is different for each of us. All we can do is honor our own truth, while respecting the views and truths of others. I think that it takes spiritual maturity to allow our spirit to be the driving force for it holds the highest truth.
The problem with evidence is it requires interpretation which generally takes place through an ideological framework. The cats view the chickens with a similar ideology to my own, yet lack the discretion I prefer which can at times put us at odds with one another. One’s ideology either incorporates evidenciary contradictions as a means to expand the ideology, or dismisses outright the possibility that any evidence could ever alter the conclusions that establish the ideological paradigm in the first place. For some the “bible” is evidence and it’s “nuff” said. For others the “gospel” is evidence with or without a bible, and though the ideology stretches to accomodate “new evidence,” it is, in comparison to the former counterpart, only a matter of discretion that separates them. Ironically it is not the “evidence” that compels us to shift in the face of ideology, but faith that a more accurate paradigm awaits our imagining and exploration. I suppose I am suggesting that the ideologue must be swayed by ideas which may or may not involve evidence, and of course, as history so frequently demonstrates, this is a terribly problematic conundrum for the human species. It is most problematic because ideology is always a communal and societal level enterprise codified in structures that resist undoing, and this, for reasons that have little to do with evidence or ideology.