I want to propose a little hypothetical, but before I do I feel it best that I warn you that it will be graphic in nature, however its purpose is not to portray a violent story for the sake of shock value or to make your stomach uneasy, but to prove the point of a underlying concept that will be at work beneath the surface of the analogy.
We are all undeniably human and I do believe that simple and oh so obvious fact is all too often forgotten in our discussions with people who happen to disagree with us, which is why before we start the hypothetical, I would first like you take a look at the fine piece of art below, painstakingly drawn by one of the most unappreciated artistic talents of our time. Tell me, what do you see when you look at it?
Okay, so my stick figure drawing is terrible and I realize I am no Van Gogh and would make Leonardo Da Vinci cry, but you have to admit that this would certainly impress the majority of 3rd grade art teachers! I mean look at those squiggly line religious symbols! This would be certainly impressive for an 8 year old! Too bad I am 30…..
All joking aside, please imagine there are actual people in place of these stick figures (our little avatars!) with the religious symbols over them. What is the first thought that comes up? Do you see a bunch of people or just a mere label? Do you see just a Muslim? Just a Jew? An atheist? A Taoist? A Christian? Hindu? Take a look at the picture again.
Now what do you see (keep your imagination going with real people in place of the stick figures)? Did they suddenly become people to you? Have you ever wondered why? I guarantee you that your Muslim neighbor has more going on about him than simply reading his Quran. Your Atheist colleague has been through a lot more heartache than she allows the world to see as she immerses herself in her work. Your Christian friend struggles with his own feelings of self worth as he tells you how worthy and valuable you are in the sight of God. My point is we are more than our surface appearance. Underneath all of the religion, socioeconomic status, race and sexuality there is an underlying theme, with similar cognitive processes (though the mini columns of an autistic person and a dyslexic may vary in degrees of closeness, they both feel the wound of rejection strongly) where we all experience, respond and act in very similar ways as a result of a common humanity we all share. This will be demonstrated in the following hypothetical.
I must apologize. This really hurts me to write and my heart is hurting as I imagine this scenario. I don’t want you or anyone reading this, let alone anyone in this world to hurt or experience any type of pain. I love you and wish only the best for you, but I will suppress my emotions and analyze this with logic and reason, ignoring the voice that is screaming inside at the painful imagery this will invoke. I am sorry.
THE HYPOTHETICAL
Imagine the most cruel and callous individual you can. This individual is “brilliant”, however he has no capacity to feel any remorse for his actions. Think of the Nazi scientists in the concentration camps that subjected infants to starvation to see how long they could survive without nourishment from their mother’s breasts by binding them up so that they were unable to feed their child. That special kind of evil that Carl Jung felt resided in all of humanities heart, “the shadow” fully awoken and allowed to be itself.
Suppose one day he is curious and comes up with a simple, yet horrifying hypothesis that he feels he must test out.
“Do people of different belief backgrounds experience pain similarly? Could it be that our Newtonian understanding of our cause and effect world applies to the neuroanatomy of the human brain? Could it be that different religions are a result of different wiring’s of brain structures and as a result, could it be possible that they experience pain differently? If atheists score higher on psychopathy than their religious peers in the scientific literature, then that does suggest a difference in cognition…. Could it be that atheism and belief can be reduced to how the electrochemical processes fire and how the pathways are designed in their brains? The data seems to suggest a difference in brain structures… If this is the case, then it may be possible that they respond to pain differently since they are responding differently to the religious ideas they are bombarded with on a daily basis. I will set up the experiment and test my hypothesis.”
Now granted I don’t know how anyone could come to this conclusion. All organisms respond to pain and I don’t think you need to understand how nerve impulses shoot messages from the spinal chord and are relayed by the thalamus to the somatosensory cortex of the brain in the parietal lobes where we experience our perception to understand… Even if psychopaths lack emotional empathy they certainly don’t lack it in the cognitive department so make a logical inference! In other words, if it causes you physical pain, of course it will cause the other person physical pain, duh! Nonetheless our evil “scientist” chooses to carry out his sinister experiment (though I am bothered by the logic of it, but look at me arguing with an imaginary character because I don’t see how you would draw this conclusion from the data! Maybe he’s not so brilliant? I am literally arguing with a fictional character I made up… Carrying on!).
In a dimly lit room to invoke fear, he rounds up twenty four people, three sets of seven from the major religions of the world (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Sikhism and Judaism) and three atheists, straps them down into chairs with their arms outstretched, bound in front of them. One by one he takes a large needle and places it onto the skin of their outstretched arms and applies pressure.
His notes are as follows…
“It appears that I was wrong in my initial assumptions, religious belief (or lack of it for that matter) has no bearing on the physical response to pain. All share a common biology (ligaments, bone, tissue, blood etc. exposed as the needle pressed through their skin) and all reacted surprisingly similar to the physical trauma, but it was the psychological aspect that I find most intriguing! One of the atheists in my study actually began to exhibit some sort of religious belief after witnessing the pain the ten before him experienced, understanding that the same fate was about to befall him! It seems we may have found one type of origin of religious belief, but then again the other two atheists showed no hint of belief in a deity like number 10 did. In fact, quite interestingly, two of the Sikhs (number 5), actually seemed like they were losing faith in God throughout the whole ordeal, especially number 14 who kept crying out to God for not saving them after witnessing number 5 up to him! There were vary degrees of similarity between the other various participants in my study, however I can with utmost certainty conclude one simple fact. Regardless if an individual has a religious faith or an absence of one did not exclude them from a physiological response to physical pain. All bled the same, all exhibited similar responses to the external stimuli (the needle penetrating their arm) and all responded to the physical trauma with varying degrees of psychological distress….
I must therefore conclude that though they may have differences in the way that they perceive and interact with the world around them, as the results from the experimental data force me to conclude, they are each undeniably human, each with their own coping mechanisms. Why I did not achieve the same results consistently with the three types in each grouping I do not know, but it seems that mere biology may not be the only factor at work here. How to test such a hypothesis, I wouldn’t know…”
BACK TO REALITY
I want you to understand that the story created above is a result of facts we all already know. What I am portraying in the above hypothetical i something called narrative reasoning, which is defined as the ability to conceptualize ideas in a story. In other words, the ability to create a story based off of nothing but ideas derived from facts. What I know of psychopaths, religion, neuroscience, psychology etc. was put in this narrative to demonstrate a concept, my ego is completely separated, but technically you already knew what I was trying to convey in the story (as dark and uncomfortable as it was to write). Every one of us has seen someone else suffer. We know that when we scrape our knee that it hurts. We know that when another person scrapes their knees it hurts them, since they too show signs of discomfort, similar to the signs we show when it happens to us. We know that if their bodies look like our bodies, that they are probably made of the same stuff. When we bleed, we notice that the other person’s is red just like ours when they bleed. We have enough information in what was just mentioned to understand just how similar we are to one another (but with the explosion of scientific advancement and google we are at even less of an excuse now!) and that is the one thing I mourn over when we forget. The psychopath in our example above is the most extreme example of someone who has lost his humanity (though you can argue that there neurological factors at work, but if you want to accept that they are doomed to psychopathy forever, then lets focus on the 99 percent of the population that does have hope then and not hang up on the 1 percent you deem doesn’t okay?), but when we devalue others, treat them with contempt or differently based on the way they look, feel or believe are we not doing something similar to what the psychopath is doing?
Throughout the hypothetical he never saw his “subjects” as people (which was clearly demonstrated when he called them by a number and not by name), but merely as “them”, merely as simple test subjects for his experiments! Are we not doing the same thing when we refer to human beings, made in the image of God as just, “those Muslims over there” or “those Jews” are we not reducing them to just a mere “number” like our psychopath did? The number for our psychopath can be viewed as an abstraction, a place holder to label a group of people. Instead of “those Muslims”, to the psychopath they were, “those 1’s.” I want to go deeper than even religion for a moment…
Let’s step away from religion for a moment and apply it to other things. Now I am not saying do not stand up for what is true (remember the purpose of this article), but when a Christian humiliates someone from the LBGT community and reduces them the French word for cigarette, do they not realize that they are humiliating a person that Christ went to die on a cross for? Did you lose their humanity along the way or did they simply become “a 1” to you, because I guarantee you that their humanity is still intact… Just like the humanity of the Native Americans on the trail of tears or the African’s in the slave trade…. We do the exact same thing when we label others as, “the gays”, “those blacks”, “those crackers”, even when an autistic says “those neurotypicals” (though I may overlook that a bit in their case because they crack me up with their honesty!). My point is the same way we can look past someone’s religious beliefs, we can look past the other things as well and still see a broken, hurting human being. I want to ask you something further…
Tell me, when a Christian dies what happens? What happens when an Atheist dies? How about a Muslim or a Jew? Do they not have funerals? Do they not mourn and cry over the loved one they have just lost? Do you see them all reminiscing and remembering all of the good times they had with their now deceased loved on? You may even find some atheists at funerals secretly hoping for an afterlife so that they can hold this person in their arms one last time just to tell them how much they love them one more time! Do you see it yet? Do you see humans now or do you still only see the religion? Are they still only Sikhs? Only Muslims? Only Christians and Jews? Just an atheist? Are they really the enemy? I won’t delve into who I think the real enemy is, but will in another article sometime Lord willing.
Now I understand that these beliefs can not be all be true with contradictory claims (which I talked about it part 1) and truth is one of the most important things to me and in fact is one of the most important things I believe a person could know, but as I have said over and over again I simply want us to look outside the bubble of our fixed perceptions because I am talking about a real truth we all need to hold close and remember!
C.S. Lewis gives a great example. If you met a starving man on an island, who was near death and had no knowledge of modern medical science, though your intentions would be pure in feeding him you would actually end up killing him, since their body has grown accustomed to eating itself. Feeding them will lead to vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration and then death. The proper way is to reintroduce small increments of food so the body has time to readjust, but if you didn’t know that, you would end up destroying him when your intentions were to save him!
Do you see how important the truth really is? What about questions like,
Is there a God? Is there a heaven? Is there a hell? Will God send people to one or the other? What is the nature of God? Is He personal or just a force? Can He be known personally or is he indifferent? A wind up the clock and let the universe kind of run?
If God sends people to heaven or hell and you gave someone the wrong answer, though your intentions may be pure and you seek their best interests in your heart, how horrible if you were wrong and you ended up destroying the person you were trying to save! Do you see the importance of truth yet?
Feeding people the wrong spiritual food will lead spiritual sickness and ultimately death. Knowing the truth about God and how to be right with Him is as important (though I would argue more important) as knowing how to care for the starving man on the island, but the only thing I am trying to demonstrate in all of this is that each person, regardless of what they believe, whether it be right or wrong is just that… a person. Are you sure atheist what you are telling the world is true? How horrible if you are wrong and they perish in hell by the lies you masqueraded as truth? Muslims are you sure what you believe is true? How horrible to die in the name of Allah with intentions to serve your king only to be sent to hell by the real King, Jesus, the Son of God! Christians are you sure the Lord Jesus rose from the dead? Are you sure you are correct? My point is, though you may have the best of intentions with the people you interact with, if you are wrong you have the potential to ruin someone’s eternal destiny by feeding the spiritually starving person the wrong food. I personally can not bear the fact of sharing the wrong information with you. I am horrified at the thought of telling you information that would have the chance to harm you. are you horrified at it? Before you speak to other about what the truth is, make sure you know it yourself. You may be wrong. I challenge everyone reading this, whether you are a Muslim, Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, etc. Grab a piece of paper, write down the evidence for what you believe and then search the web and read all of the objections to what you believe and see if it stands the test of scrutiny. If your belief can stand up to the most vicious scrutiny, you may be on to something because truth speaks for itself. I do want to reiterate something again.
When dialoguing with others on topics such as these it is of the utmost importance that we remember that we are talking to our neighbor, a member of the human family. When you take away religious belief, when you take away race, when you take away sexuality and politics the one thing you are left with is a fellow human being, made in the image of God just as you are, who has hopes, dreams, fears, hurts, pain and a desire for love and to be loved.
I wanted to share this because this is something that the Lord had to teach me. I was so focused on winning the argument (telling me 2 + 2 is 5 would frustrate me beyond belief) that I ended up losing the person. I remember the Holy Spirit convicting me and reminding me that the person I had just “demolished” had feelings, thoughts, a perspective and a need to love and be loved just as I did. I now understand (thank you Jesus) that truth matters, but so does the person I am telling it to. In my arguments with others I realize that I forgot their humanity just as our villain did the hypothetical.
Though I didn’t physically press a needle into their skin, though my cruelty may never have abounded to his level, when I made people feel stupid, when I towered and bellowed over them after dominating them and making them feel small, when I was harsh in sharing the truth with them and showed no mercy or understanding for their past experiences or perspective, it was as if I was pushing a different type needle through their arm, inflicting a different type of pain, not understanding the damage I was causing. When I was indifferent to the feelings of the people I was hurting, I was like the villain who was indifferent to his subjects pain. I was more concerned about proving a point than for the people I was talking to themselves, just like the villain was more concerned with finding out if his hypothesis was true than the pain he was inflicting on those people.
I will wrap up with this. In our interactions with others, be kind. We never know what someone is going through and we must always remember that despite differences in views and beliefs we have, we must never forget that we are still talking to a person and we have no right to hurt them. The Truth can hurt and is uncomfortable and we must unpack to each individual in the most loving way possible (though that may look different for each person) I will end with this scripture.
Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.
Ephesians 4:19
Thank you for taking the time to read and God Bless
This is awesome! Excellent work, very good read!