July 18, 2011

Busybodies


Recently I was at a social event where a man was bending my ear with a lot of misinformation, rumors and unfounded statements. My efforts to tell him the truth and refute his accusations didn’t get far and he insisted his statements were accurate. He referenced his source of information as being the local coffee groups in town that were saying the same things. We are all familiar with the Timothy passage (1 Tim 5:13) about idle women being busybodies and gossips. However after a little Scripture research, I’m comfortable with putting this particular man, his actions and his thought processes in the category of being a gossip…quite the unmanly picture.

1 comment:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----Gossip is the revelation of personal details or sensational information about other persons. Accuracy of the information involved really is not a quality for categorizing behavior as gossip. Gossip relates more to the irrelevance of information to any valid interests of either the speaker and the listeners.
-----It is difficult to tell where discussing community affairs turns from the quest for being responsibly informed into participating in gossip. The key is always the relevance of the information to common interests. Unless there is a particularly pernicious gossip going about concerning someone rather well known, I would be surprised that “coffee groups in town” would so uniformly attend one topic of gossip. I wouldn’t at all be surprised that one group might stumble across one or more pieces of gossip, and another might stumble across different ones. That’s human nature; it happens. This plus reading that you attempted to correct his misinformation leads me to wonder if maybe the point of your fluster might be other than mere gossip.
-----Arrogance can be naive or completely intentional. It is sad when it is naive. A lot of basically good people get involved in community discussions without truly vetting either information or its sources. Their own accumulated perceptions seem to be the sole filtration they apply. And that is just a nice way of saying they are being biased. No amount of reasoning or information correction will effect the viewpoints of a biased person.
-----We are all biased to a certain extent. The only way a person can understand and relate to anything is through his own accumulated perceptions. Try imagining a person understanding something according to what he has never before thought. The only way someone can understand anything is by thought. Thought only happens through what has become known or accepted as known. It takes a lot of ambition and hard work to vet what is known against what is actually real. But the more ambitiously and effectively we do this, the less biased we become; the less naively arrogant will we face the fact that truth stands as it is for our discovery rather than for our concoction. Prov 2:1-15 well serves this principle of an ambitious struggle against the bias which makes naive arrogance. It erects a lighthouse on the rock of reality for directing an individual’s own perceptions.
-----I know the term “arrogant“ has harsh connotations. That is unfortunate, because the term is merely the antithesis of humility. People are ok with not being particularly humble. In fact, a lot of people feel a certain disdain for the concept of “humble”. That those people do not then feel a certain attractiveness about arrogance illustrates the level of bias involved in deceit. Nobody can be both not humble and not arrogant. Therefore, arrogant is an extremely useful categorization.
-----To regard your difficult person as being a gossip has some utility. But if indeed the topics of his discussions has community relevance, his rightful participation in them might properly remove him from that regard. Sorting him into the “arrogant” category, at least concerning the issue at hand, could be instructive. Yet volatile.

Love you all,
Steve Corey