Right from the time God created Adam, He gave Adam the job of labelling/naming the animals etc. The gift of identifying things is God-given. However, when we take that gift and begin labelling through OUR understanding we make a few grave errors of judgement.
1) When we THINK that our subjective perspective is the answer we are acting on the assumption that what we think is absolute, and that we know more than God who knows EVERYTHING. Even our motives. We effectively are declaring ourselves god when we think our answer is better than God’s Answer. This delusion is called a god-complex.
2) Our god-complex is based on what we know. Because we don’t know everything (science admits that), by default we are judging from limited understanding. This is known as cognitive or filter bias. Our mind can only judge through the filter of the information it has. Culture, education, socialisation, environment, parental influence, media, and experiences have all imprinted data in our mind. This is problematic because, not one person can therefore claim being authentic because we are influenced. If our influences have been wrong, we have the wrong data in our mind whereby we make wrong assumptions. We label incorrectly.
3) Because we have inbuilt bias because we are influenced, our survivalist instinct forces us to gather information that affirms our imprinted data. This is known as confirmation bias. People say things like, “This is my culture,” or “our family does it this way, “ or “this is my crew.” We then PUT ON a character that represents our confirmation bias thinking of ourselves as an identity. We become pretentious- pretending to be something. The reality is that humans shape-shift depending on our associations. This shape-shifting tells us that self-view regarding identity isn’t fixed but a fabrication of learned information.
Matthew 2 ends with a POWERFUL examination of bias, pretentiousness, and labelling.
Jesus grew up in an area that was seen as of low value. God did this deliberately to point out our bias, pretentiousness, and labelling.
As we gather information the one question that we ALL NEED TO ASK is, “If the God of the Bible is THE TRUTH (and He is) how would that impact the way I think about my learned bias, pretentiousness, and labelling?”
If the God of the Bible IS THE TRUTH, then anything that is not subjected to God’s point of view is merely judgement made through the corrupted eyes of self parading god-complex in the fabricated “world” of our limited understanding.
Considering that the humanities show that humans are biased, and the sciences show we don’t know everything, isn’t it then a logical conclusion that we might very well be wrong in our assessment whether God exists, or if the God of the Bible is THE TRUTH.
As a quote states (apologies I can’t remember the source), “The atheist is tasked to search the entire universe. For where they have not searched they may find God there.”
The point is that it is utter arrogance to declare we have the answer when we don’t know ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING there is to know to assess if what we assume holds within the full knowledge of everything.
Don’t you think?
What bias, pretentiousness, and labelling are you guilty of that needs to be brought under the authority of God’s Knowledge?
#Hayibo 