In a TV
interview Kasich campaign spokesperson Trent Duffy addressed the potential of a
GOP contested convention. Duffy said if it went to an open convention the GOP
would select, “…someone who best represents the party.” Interesting. The establishment
doesn’t intent to put someone forward who represents the people, but someone
who represents the party. We see something similar in the church when leaders
put their own agenda ahead of the spiritual needs in the body of Christ. The high
priest Caiaphas, who was concerned more with politics than the innocence of
Jesus, is a good example. Caiaphas said, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for
the people than that the whole nation perish” (John 11:49b-50
NIV)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----In The Social Contract, Rousseau was sure to state that democracy would work only so long as there were no political affiliations, associations, or any other groupings within the overall body politic. Democracy could work only when each and every member cast his vote based upon his own conclusions reached independently of any persuasion, influence, or pressure from anyone else. We now have two leviathans serving up two excellent case studies on what Rousseau meant.
-----The first effect of any group, be it your family, your church, your model airplane club, or your country is group identity. Group identity either emerges passively from the admixture of its members’ identities, or it is actively created for the group. Either way identity is established, members begin seeking alignments with it for various reasons running the scale from a mere desire to receive benefits from associating with the group to a relentless quest for ultimate power. Such seeking creates biases. Biases create deleterious effects upon knowing truth and dealing with circumstances accordingly.
-----Group identity then provides the second effect by the very bias it creates. The need to “identify” expresses itself in accepting the think of the group. Every group has a “think”. It is actually a part of the group’s identity, but it is more concretely a knowledge than a nature. It includes accepted facts, rejected facts, and accepted and rejected means of manipulating facts. For example, the less defined groups of conservatives and liberals have very different means by which conclusions are rendered from information. Conservative methods involve logic, reasoning, and comparisons to ideas previously found to be relatively true. Liberal methods involve fitting information into patterns established by previously defined and prescribed attitudes. Although conservative methods show much better thought style than liberal methods, both methods tend to at least somewhat steer thought into previously established channels, thus becoming dampers to a mind’s quest for knowledge. Group identity can box up the mind. Evolution is an excellent example of boxed up mentality. Ideas about uniform processes occurring over billions of years are clueless for what to do with such anomalies as carbon-14 atoms sometimes found in diamonds, soft tissues and even some remnants of blood cells recently found inside dinosaur fossils, depictions of dinosaurs found in ancient rock art, and irreducible complexity -biological systems so complicated and interrelated that one element of the system is meaningless and useless without the rest such that the pressures of survival could never have produced the entire system without producing it all at once, which production would be an absurdity. Eyesight is a good example. The complicated eyeball is meaningless without the equally complicated occipital lobes and their complex networking with the rest of the brain. Yet the group think of evolution winks at it all instead of trashing its unworthy box.
-----Then again, groups are certainly neither meaningless nor entirely detrimental. Christ’s body is a group. And it comes complete with group think provided by an actual, physical, ink on paper manual. Group mentality, like everything in life, is a tight-rope walk. Unbalance in any direction can occasion a nasty fall. So, it can be used or abused.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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