Barry, I don't think it is laziness. When people simply don't want to know something, ignorance is a choice. Often a strategy.
For example, I regularly hear Canadians trashing the U.S. and its government who clearly have nooooo idea what they are talking about.
It's not that they couldn't find out. They could type a question into the navbar. "Can President Trump strike down the 1st Amendment?" (No.) "Is he free to ignore it?" (Not for long.)
But finding such things out would mean that they could not indulge their favourite anti-American fantasies. So they don't. And they only listen to those who confirm their biases and beliefs.
Fortunately, none of the people I am thinking of are dangerous to anyone (but themselves).
However, picture the same mindset among young people who can be recruited for violence. Now you have a group from which assassins and rioters can easily be recruited.
Schools used to try to circumvent this sort of thing. Today, they may well be encouraging it.
Denyse, I suppose we may both be right depending on the individual. Willful ignorance can be difficult to distinguish from laziness. Either way, it does not bode well.
Some of this is the inherent laziness found in the room temperature IQs inhabiting the so called social sciences and humanities departments of all too many colleges and universities.
However, we have to bear our own culpability here too. For far too long we’ve been tone policed and declared “not winsome” whenever we dare to offer even the smallest amount of push back against the world. The Seeker Sensitive/Attractional Church models and philosophies are lonnnng overdue for their date with the large garbage container conflagration. Any man looking to fill a pulpit for more than just the morning announcements had best find his courage because the pendulum swing the other direction is going to be messy.
Worse, we have allowed the experientialists and emotives to declare the intellect the enemy of the faith. “Knowledge leads to pride” says one former pastor of ours deliberately suggesting that knowledge is a bad thing. Not many of us even know of, let alone could indicate the contents of one or more of the historic confessions of the faith. We declared catechism a “Catholic” thing and promptly replaced it with VeggieTales and gross out games. Very few could connect current moral controversies in our culture to scripture apart from what they’ve read on social media. Charlie Kirk educated himself on theology and morality far past many pastors as near as I can tell. And still his most vocal tone critics came from so-called evangelicals. And when these people aren’t tone policing everyone who dares to disagree, they are actively seeking ways to become more like the world.
Case in point, what if the head of IVCF or Cru had been killed? Would anyone have noticed? Could they have filled even a medium sized church let alone an NFL stadium? Two long standing college ministries that syncretized, pandered, accommodated, and tone policed themselves into irrelevance. They became intellectually lazy themselves and were thus ripe for the enemy to compromise them. Charlie Kirk showed that standing unmovable on the unchanging Truth of Christ has an impact.
Yeah, the left’s intellectual laziness is on full display for those with eyes to see. But I won’t let our side off the hook for their own intellectual laziness either. Charlie Kirk proved that solid apologetics and an unwillingness to budge one Angstrom on the truth still has an impact and a far greater one than our lazy intellects could dare to dream.
Barry, I don't think it is laziness. When people simply don't want to know something, ignorance is a choice. Often a strategy.
For example, I regularly hear Canadians trashing the U.S. and its government who clearly have nooooo idea what they are talking about.
It's not that they couldn't find out. They could type a question into the navbar. "Can President Trump strike down the 1st Amendment?" (No.) "Is he free to ignore it?" (Not for long.)
But finding such things out would mean that they could not indulge their favourite anti-American fantasies. So they don't. And they only listen to those who confirm their biases and beliefs.
Fortunately, none of the people I am thinking of are dangerous to anyone (but themselves).
However, picture the same mindset among young people who can be recruited for violence. Now you have a group from which assassins and rioters can easily be recruited.
Schools used to try to circumvent this sort of thing. Today, they may well be encouraging it.
Denyse, I suppose we may both be right depending on the individual. Willful ignorance can be difficult to distinguish from laziness. Either way, it does not bode well.
Some of this is the inherent laziness found in the room temperature IQs inhabiting the so called social sciences and humanities departments of all too many colleges and universities.
However, we have to bear our own culpability here too. For far too long we’ve been tone policed and declared “not winsome” whenever we dare to offer even the smallest amount of push back against the world. The Seeker Sensitive/Attractional Church models and philosophies are lonnnng overdue for their date with the large garbage container conflagration. Any man looking to fill a pulpit for more than just the morning announcements had best find his courage because the pendulum swing the other direction is going to be messy.
Worse, we have allowed the experientialists and emotives to declare the intellect the enemy of the faith. “Knowledge leads to pride” says one former pastor of ours deliberately suggesting that knowledge is a bad thing. Not many of us even know of, let alone could indicate the contents of one or more of the historic confessions of the faith. We declared catechism a “Catholic” thing and promptly replaced it with VeggieTales and gross out games. Very few could connect current moral controversies in our culture to scripture apart from what they’ve read on social media. Charlie Kirk educated himself on theology and morality far past many pastors as near as I can tell. And still his most vocal tone critics came from so-called evangelicals. And when these people aren’t tone policing everyone who dares to disagree, they are actively seeking ways to become more like the world.
Case in point, what if the head of IVCF or Cru had been killed? Would anyone have noticed? Could they have filled even a medium sized church let alone an NFL stadium? Two long standing college ministries that syncretized, pandered, accommodated, and tone policed themselves into irrelevance. They became intellectually lazy themselves and were thus ripe for the enemy to compromise them. Charlie Kirk showed that standing unmovable on the unchanging Truth of Christ has an impact.
Yeah, the left’s intellectual laziness is on full display for those with eyes to see. But I won’t let our side off the hook for their own intellectual laziness either. Charlie Kirk proved that solid apologetics and an unwillingness to budge one Angstrom on the truth still has an impact and a far greater one than our lazy intellects could dare to dream.
Nailed it.