Strongman Jesus

Has anyone else noticed a trend of Christians inventing a new Jesus more to their liking?

This strongman Jesus is very “manly” and doesn’t let anybody push him around, especially not women or foreigners. This new Jesus is white and proud of it. He backs winners” and shames “losers”

Strongman Jesus has no qualms about taking power and using it to influence politics and economics. He is wealthy and getting wealthier. He doesn’t talk about loving your enemies or turning the other cheek. Strongman Jesus carries a gun in his back pocket like Junior Falwell to shoot those who refuse to bow to him. 

I can understand the desire to be more in sync with the world in these ways but this fabricated Jesus does not come from the Bible and certainly bears no similarity to the real Jesus who flatly rejected all those things and said you’d recognize his followers because they will reject them, too. 

I am expecting the usual responses from my Evangelical friends who will say “where are you seeing this? My church is wonderful and no one says anything like this. So, if I am imagining this I would love to be wrong. I love the real Jesus too much to let “peer pressure “ lead me to invent a more culturally palatable version. Do you see this happening too? Share examples

The most dangerous spiritual addiction

superficiality is the curse of our age

Forty years ago Richard Foster opened his instantly classic spiritual guide Celebration of Discipline with these prophetic words “ superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.“
Superficiality Is, indeed, the curse of our age. these words are, if anything, even more true today than they were four decades ago.
While it seems counterintuitive to welcome pain, it is essential to our well-being and survival--alerting us to the need to attend to injury, illness, or loss. Like all mammals, humans are designed with a neural system that closely links physical pain with social/emotional pain, a “broken heart” utilizes the same neural pathways as a broken arm or leg. our natural instinct is to seek pleasure and avoid pain.. however, as the only mammal designed in the image of God, human beings are capable of experiencing and processing pain at spiritual levels. Beneath the surface.
Depth and superficiality exist as poles on a continuum. Movement on that continuum is defined by one’s capacity to feel and make good use of the spiritual pain that comes from facing our own sin and the brokenness of the world.

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”

― Eugene O'Neill

We are born into a world that is broken, at odds with its creator. by God’s grace We mature, spiritually, by both mourning that brokenness and participating in God’s plan for mending it, restoring Shalom. Those who are unable or unwilling to enter the spiritual deep end of life’s pool must remain in or regress to the fragility and superficiality of spiritual infancy They demand immediate comfort and satisfaction. They cannot acknowledge their own inadequacy. They cannot tolerate tension, paradox or complexity, they flee from anything that brings discomfort and they construct elaborate illusions to make themselves feel safe and comfortable. By cutting themselves off from deeper realities they remain spiritually weak and underdeveloped, requiring others to accommodate their superficiality. If possible, they surround themselves with other spiritually shallow people who will not challenge them to mature and will both affirm that theirs Is the right and reasonable way to be and join them in judging those that disagree. This enables them to believe that rather than the weaker brother or sister that easily stumbles they are actually superior.
Spiritual superficiality is an addiction because, like substance abuse, it fosters habituation and dependency. By never facing painful realities the shallow person does not develop the strengths to face those realities, perpetuating a vicious cycle.
In Celebration of Discipline Foster demonstrates that promoting spiritual depth requires more than theological or Biblical education, it requires spiritual formation. Without attention to such formation we remain spiritually shallow, focused on image management over substance. Like the religious leaders that Jesus exposed, the surface may look clean and proper while inside we are filthy.
American evangelicalism is in desperate need of a focus on spiritual depth over superficiality. Almost every day there is a new story of a prominent individual or organization that has been plotting and bullying to prop up their glittering surface image and keep hidden their shameful secrets.

No longer ruled by fear

 Parker J Palmer asks the question
 “It’s September, the start of the school year. For many kids, it’s an exciting growing edge moment and scary at the same time. When you’ve felt afraid on the growing edge of your adult life, what has helped you walk into your fear toward what excites you? What helps you keep fear from blocking your next steps toward your “deep gladness””

which prompted these thoughts for me. 

Much of my life has been dominated by fear.

Born into a fundamentalist church, my early years were filled with the fear that if I did not think and believe the “right” things and make the right decisions, as dictated by those in authority, i would be ineligible for heaven. Even more tangibly I knew that I could be shunned and shamed by the same Evangelical community that for all intents and purposes, had become my world
When I publically exposed the wrongdoing of the leaders of the evangelical community where I had invested nearly three decades of my personal and professional life I knew that my life, there, would be over. What “helped me walk into my fear toward what excites me” was the firm belief that I was following jesus off the road of a life defined by not displeasing those in power and into an exciting life of embodied solidarity with the powerless

response to MacArthur's statement against Social Justice and the Gospel

The first rule of evangelicalism Is: Do not criticize evangelicalism. 

You know a belief system has become fragile when its adherents feel the need to preemptively cut off challenges to their beliefs. 

continuing in the cruel and fissiparous spirit of The Nashville Statement, John MacArthur and his ilk have posted the next installment of their straight white patriarchal manifesto for the preservation of American evangelicalism in the form of the Statement on Social justice and the gospel, which clearly is a misnomer, since their point seems to be that social justice and the gospel have nothing to do with each other.. Having failed to silence voices from outside their tribalist bubble these men have decided their next best strategy is to frighten those within into covering their eyes and ears so that they cannot succumb to viral ideas against which they have not been sufficiently inoculated, particularly the dangerous and "unbiblical" idea of so-called "Social Justice.” In their rush to judge and silence ideas they find objectionable they are either ignorant or dismissive of entire Christian traditions devoted to the Biblical understanding of social justice. This is not particularly surprising from MacArthur, who has made other sweeping pronouncements about how those outside the white American Evangelical culture are not true Christians. For example, he arrogated ”We all understand that people in the Hispanic world know about christ. . . But they don’t know Christ. And they don’t know the Gospel” He is being consistent, then, when he and his cohort assert ‘WE AFFIRM that some cultures operate on assumptions that are inherently better than those of other cultures.’

There is no acknowledgement that Evangelicalism is, itself, a culture with its own inadequacies.

It’s all about racism

While his critique is ostensibly with the evangelical concern for social justice in general, MacArthur reserves almost all of his ire for the topic of racism which he dismisses as a primarily made-up issue invented by minority peoples who have been taught to feel like victims, thus distracting the church from the tasks of preaching and teaching. MacArthur repeatedly states how unfair it is that he should be accused of wielding power and privilege when he feels neither. in this way he trots out the tired cliche that the oppressors are the real victims and the victims the real oppressors. Oddly enough, in the middle of his sequence of affirmations and denials one topic pops up as particularly out of place. In the topic of HERESY there is superficial affirmation that teaching false doctrines should be eschewed But then follows a seemingly unnecessary insistence that being imperfect does not warrant an accusation of heresy. Since this topic is not at all linked to the document’s theme of social justice one is left with the impression that MacArthur has thrown this in in anticipation of criticism he may receive, especially in light of several public accusations of heresy his teaching has, previously, engendered.

Who is worthy?

my greatest frustration with this and similar documents is the arrogant tone with which the authors presume to be the only ones possessing the competence and Authority with which to interpret scripture on these matters. His view of scripture, like that of so many evangelicals seems very shallow and facile, as If it is only an instruction book. In the Nashville Statement. They went so far as to say there could be no room for disagreement—challenging their interpretation of Scripture in that document essentially delegitimizes the christian faith of the critic. In this document MacArthur clarifies “We further deny that competency to teach on any biblical issue comes from any qualification for spiritual people other than clear understanding and simple communication of what is revealed in Scripture.” (Emphasis mine) They do not clarify their criteria for being “a spiritual person” capable of understanding and preaching the gospel, however, as noted above, MacArthur has already declared that Hispanic people are not qualified to understand and teach, because of their inferior culture. Later in the affirmation of complementarianism he notes that women are not qualified to understand and teach what the scriptures reveal.

MacArthur’s confidence in his own objectivity is troubling. I hope that if he found himself on a church committee charged with disciplining a congregant and it turned out the congregant was a family member that he would have the honesty and integrity to recuse himself for lack of objectivity. but, who knows how far his belief in his freedom from bias goes? He does not address the issue of conflict of interest, the fact that he is naming himself the authority on who has authority. I wonder, does he not see how it diminishes his credibility when he, a white, American evangelical man works so frantically to silence those who seek to awaken white people to the benefits they have enjoyed at others’ expense? And when he seeks to silence those who would remind us of the genocidal atrocities that expose the lie of “American exceptionalism?”and when he declares that there is no room for christian disagreement with his hermeneutic? And when he ignores and silences decades of biblical scholarship on gender equality?

As Shakespeare might say, the man doth protest too much, methinks.

Nothing below the surface

The document begins with a blanket dismissal of the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science as having nothing to contribute to the life of faith. This kind of anti-intellectualism and hubris is very reminiscent of the fundamentalism of the first half of the 20th century. If you say the word fundamentalist around a group of evangelicals, especially well educated evangelicals, you are likely to be the recipient of a lengthy lecture on the fundamentalist-modernist debates. In the face of modernism at the turn-of-the-century there was great excitement about what science and technology could bring to humanity. Fundamentalists, however, were threatened by these new ideas. Where modernism proposed the truth is an ever growing narrative discovered more deeply as you peel away the layers, fundamentalists dug in and insisted that there is no new truth. the narrative is already written and anything found that doesn’t fit with that narrative must be rejected. this was even taken to the extreme that when fundamentalist timetables for creation did not match with the fossil records many fundamentalists insisted that God had lied and intentionally deceived us with false fossils to test whether we would believe our eyes and scientific instruments or believe the Bible as they interpreted it.Essentially, anything that conflicts with the approved narrative is “Fake News." Evangelicalism grew out of fundamentalism when some Christians were not threatened by the scientific methods of modernism. they felt confident that “all truth is God‘s truth“ and that the things discovered through other avenues of study, if they were true, would not conflict with scripture, and if they seemed to, perhaps it was the understanding of scripture that needed correction. This attitude became the hallmark of evangelicalism and of evangelical schools like Wheaton College. to the common request for a definition of evangelicalism a common inside joke back in the day was “an evangelical is a fundamentalist that went to college.” In times of uncertainty and turmoil it is tempting to return to the seeming safety and comfort of a closed system where there are no unanswered questions. Fundamentalism is also characterized by its superficiality. Since the fundamentalist worldview doesn’t allow for complexity or The possibility of multiple perspectives it demands the dogmatic belief that there is only one authoritative, right perspective on anything and it is attainable by anyone who reads the Bible, which is a facile and simple summary of God’s rules. 

Particularly troubling to fundamentalists is any notion that there might be truth to which they do not have access or, especially, that there might be part of themselves to which they do not have easy access. With modernism came the thoroughly modern world view of Sigmund Freud and his study of the human unconscious. In the present postmodern world it is second nature to understand that human beings have hidden depths of which they are not always aware. 

You don't   know what you're doing.

MacArthur’s blanket denial that sin he can’t see might be at work subtly in the depths of his being is a mark of fundamentalist anxiety. It also flies in the face of the testimony of scripture. When Jesus looked down from the cross on those who had shouted “crucify him!“ He said “ father forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.“ --they were still responsible and needed forgiveness but they did not know their own hearts. likewise, the apostle Paul speaks of the human depths of the heart when he says “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate  And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.  For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[a] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.Romans 7:15-24 New International Version (NIV)”ƒƒ 21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?Romans 7:15-24 New International Version (NIV) 

The reflexive denial of the realities of unconscious and systemic racism and the unwillingness to consider the limits of their own knowledge in these issues exposes the authors’ fearful intention of leading the church in a regression to fundamentalism.How many fellow believers have to shout “you don’t know what you are doing" before evangelicals like John MacArthur will finally listen? 

Evangelicals love to adore white male leaders and follow them unquestioningly. John MacAurthur and his cronies have enjoyed that adoration too long to be able to see how they now self-servingly work to preserve it. What they don't  know about themselves will control them, but they can take some control and be transformed when they face the uncomfortable truth.

Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world

I used o begin classes with brief “devotional” thoughts like this. This one is a reflection on a current facebook conversation.

• Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is. Romans 12:2

• 
  

Too late in my life I realized how much of my life energy had been wasted on the fear of displeasing my tribe, trying to avoid anything that might not feel, look, sound taste or smell “evangelical” enough. All the while I accepted the lie that “the world” was entirely out there, outside the safe, superior evangelical bubble that had become my world. I tried to ignore the fact that the bubble was smack in the middle of THE world and, often, indistringuishable from it.

So, I became conformed to the pattern of this bubble world, thst parttern of ignoring the depths and looking only at the surface
Now, I seek to conform to the pattern of the kingdom of heaven. I am learning to stop looking with the intent of insantly judging--the pattern to which I had conformed--and to look, instead, with the desire to see.
Where, once, I had become conformed I am, now, being transformed.

You don’t know what you’re doing, and neither do I.

I have always been fascinated by the hidden depths and intricate complexities of the human psyche. That fascination led me into the field of clinical psychology where, as a psychotherapist, I helped people explore and find healing in those depths.

My fascination also led me to become a graduate school professor where, for 27 years, I trained fledgling psychotherapists in the foundational principles of psychodynamic psychology.
Unlike other psychologies that approach the psyche primarily from the superficial conscious level of experience, psychodynamic psychology is based on the understanding that we have unconscious depths. There is no such thing as a pure, unadulterated, or objective human perception or experience. Every moment of our lives we are being influenced by forces, internal and external, conscious and unconscious, that push us in one direction or another   These forces might be as simple as the signal from my stomach that tells me I am hungry or as complex as the "Signal" from my wife that tells me I'd better make my own dinner.

Consequently, the question is never "have the things I think I know been influenced by forces outside my awareness" but, rather, "to what extent have the things I think I know been influenced by forces outside my awareness." This flies in the face of the universal human inclination to trust one's own mind above all else. We all know that our minds can be deceived, but the average person is incapable of discerning when that has happened.
We are convinced by our experiences of certainty despite the fact that certainty is an emotion and, like all emotions, easily manipulated. Certainty is something you feel, not something you "have" or attain. It is based at least as much in neurochemistry as in facts or evidence. In fact, a feeling of certainty carries absolutely no authority.

Here’s an illustration. After the tragedy at Charlottesville, I was having coffee with  a friend when he said: "it's too bad those liberal protesters had to start all that violence." I challenged him and he insisted he was absolutely certain that this was true because there was video surveillance footage. I let it go, but the next day I asked if he had sources that I could look at. He blustered about me not trusting his judgment but then relented and promised to send the weblinks via email. I was surprised but waited with eager anticipation for a new perspective.

When no email arrived after a week, we met for coffee again. When I asked he quickly admitted he had lied about the video but insisted that the lie was completely justified. “You have been brainwashed by the liberal media,” he explained, “so you are incapable of seeing the obvious truth.” He, on the other hand, has been listening to authoritative "people in the know" for years. These sources say that it happened as he said. He felt it was urgent to "save" me from my ignorance so he lied, hoping my feelings for him would be enough to convince me of the truth. In all sincerity, he lied to me to get me to believe what he felt certain to be true. Needless to say, I will never trust my friend's feelings of certainty again, but I was able to forgive him and salvage our friendship. I could do that because I, too, have been "that guy" in more ways than one.

I spent 50 years immersed in a very dogmatic Evangelical subculture in which being right was more important than virtually anything else. In fact, being right in one's theological beliefs separated the "real Christians" from everyone else and determined whether or not one was going to heaven. Absolute certainty was a requirement and anything less was considered lack of faith. I remember with deep regret innumerable times that I dismissed or disrespected others because I felt certain I was right and they were wrong. As an adult, I began examining my heart and realized that there were many things I said that I believed with absolute certainty when, in fact, I had never been allowed to come to those beliefs through the usual questions and doubts. I knew I would be shamed, shunned, and ridiculed if I did not say that I believed these things. I remember concluding that someone more qualified than I must have determined that they were true.

When I was a professor, my favorite class every year was the one in which I started by projecting the following statement at the front of the room: "what you call your "faith" is a collection of illusions that you have constructed to protect yourself from your existential fears." I would read the statement aloud and then sit down on the desk at the front of the room to scan the students' faces. In my first year of teaching, the first thing I noticed was that some of the students were grinning at me. These were the students who had come to graduate school for exactly this kind of discussion. They were ready to dive in. I also noticed faces that looked more worried, or even angry. In fact, the very first time, a middle-aged woman in the back row quickly snatched up her belongings and rushed out the door. I followed her into the hallway where she told me with real fear in her voice that she had been thinking such questions all her life but knew that if she said them out loud she would be rejected by her church and possibly divorced by her husband. I did my best to assure her that, while I could not guarantee what would happen at home, in my classroom she would be safe to ask any questions and express any thoughts without danger.

Back in the classroom, I would sit at the desk in silence. By this point in the semester, my students knew that I could comfortably sit in silence for the next two hours if they did not initiate and engage in a meaningful discussion. The first comments usually came from a student who, like me, Had grown up in an evangelical subculture. He, and it almost always was he, would often quote Scripture in an attempt to defeat the opening statement, the very definition of begging the question. Other students would point out the flaws in that argument and the discussion would be off and running. Over the years this discussion proved to be rather predictable because we had all been trained with the same  evangelical scripts.  As I guided the discussion the point would eventually come when a student would excitedly announce:  "I just realized, the statement doesn't say that my beliefs are false, only that I didn't arrive at them as simply as I thought I did!” This is the moment I was waiting for because from that point we could have a genuine exploration.  We could now explore the inner world of thoughts, feelings and beliefs and the unconscious forces that make it impossible for us to be certain of our objectivity. Since there is no such thing as objectivity the closest thing one can accomplish is a genuine curiosity about oneself and the sources of one's beliefs in an uncensored way. For psychologists-in-training, the capacity to observe oneself is the most essential skill. As my students and I transparently explored the forces that had pushed and pulled us toward our beliefs they were honing the skills that they would need as psychotherapists.

Like the woman who ran out of class many of the students uncovered fears associated with asking difficult questions, not only because their place in their religious community hung in the balance but, they'd been told,  so did their very salvation. The rules in my classroom were different:

 Doubt is not the opposite of faith, the opposite of faith is certainty.

Doubt is, in fact, a prerequisite of faith. Without room for doubt, belief becomes indistinguishable from delusion.

I certainly could not condemn my friend for trusting in his feeling of certainty since I have done the same myself many times. My strongest lesson in understanding certainty comes from my experience of disability from a major traumatic brain injury. In 2008 a small home accident caused a tiny tear in the interior wall of my right carotid artery. That tear caused a clot that precipitated a massive ischemic stroke in the right hemisphere of my brain. As I lay on the ground waiting to be found I felt an unnatural lack of concern or anxiety. I felt a great sense of certainty that I was merely tired and dehydrated and once someone helped me up I would be fine. Only later did I realize that I was experiencing a common symptom of right hemisphere brain damage: anosognosia, a lack of awareness of one's own disability. In its extreme form anosognosia can cause the disabled patient, even if partially paralyzed, to insist that he or she is perfectly fine. Perhaps the most prominent historical example is William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice who although confined to a wheelchair denied any limitations at all.

Although I am a psychologist and practiced in self-awareness, I could not escape the effects of damage to my brain. I lay on the ground feeling absolutely certain that I was fine until my wife found me and tried to help me up. When I saw the terror in her eyes as she looked at my drooping face, it hit me that I had had a stroke.

False feelings of certainty and deficits in self-awareness are obviously not confined to the topics of religious belief and brain damage. In fact, nothing could be more relevant to the topics in the headlines and In conversations on social media or around the dinner table. Like my friend and I discussing the tragedy at Charlottesville, most of us find ourselves occasionally shaking our heads in disbelief at the opinions of the people we thought we knew.

I remember vividly the day that I made a covenant committing myself to accept others' feedback about my limitations. It was soon after my stroke while I was in intensive care. I needed to have a bowel movement so two orderlies carried me from my bed and placed me on a commode. One handed me a roll of toilet paper and said: "you ok?" I nodded and they left. It hadn't occurred to me that I would be anything but ok, At age 46 I had been wiping my own butt for a long time and I felt fine. But after they left I lost my balance and fell to the floor. Thankfully only my pride was injured when the commode tipped over and spilled on top of me. The next day my surgeon called the two orderlies into my room where he berated them for leaving a stroke patient in such a dangerous situation. I remember the awful feeling in my gut as he shouted at them "you don't ask the patient if he is okay trying something unassisted, We decide if he is ready for that!"  At that moment I vowed to never hide from awareness of anything about myself. Realizing that my brain injury limited my awareness, I made a Ulysses contract with my wife.

In Homer's Iliad Ulysses wanted to hear the beautiful songs of the sirens although he knew they would drive him insane and destroy him and his crew. He made a pact with his sailors that they would tie him to the mast and not let him loose no matter how much he begged. They would fill their ears with beeswax so only he would hear the beautiful but deadly music. He instructed them to kill him If he broke loose. Ulysses contracts are sometimes made by those with severe mental illness in which they instruct their loved ones to force them to receive treatment in the future if they experience a severely debilitating episode.  I told my wife that the day would likely come when I would not accurately see my own limitations, so I made a covenant to seek and trust feedback from her or others close to me regarding the evaluation of my capacity.

The first test came when she refused to let me drive. It took three years before I improved enough to regain my license. However, the biggest test of my commitment to that contract came 8 years after my stroke when my faculty colleagues told me "we think it is time for you to move on and let someone else take your place." 

I have a Ulysses moment whenever my friends of color—or white women for that matter—tell me what it is like to survive in this culture designed to preserve white male privilege and promote white supremacy. They have to understand me better than I understand myself so they can live in a world designed for me. They must be winsome and non-threatening while also stroking white male egos, finding a tolerable balance between showing the deference expected by those in power and maintaining self-respect.  I used to tell my students "until you have been out of the brine you don't know that you are a pickle." For most of my life, I was unaware that the world operates differently for me than for women and people of color. It was just the world, not my world. It seems so naive now, but I used to think “everyone gets the same chances.”

Now that I have awakened to those realities, I am astounded by the grace and patience extended to me by those wounded by my ignorance. Because our perception of the world is shaped and molded by race, culture, and gender we are, to some extent, "disabled" for living in a pluralistic, multicultural world. This numbing habituation lulls us into something akin to the anosognosia of a brain injury. We feel we know with certainty what is real and true despite the extreme limitations to our awareness.

At this point in the conversation (and frankly this is especially true of white males) people will sometimes throw up their hands and say "well, then, everything is relative, you can say anything you want is true." That kind of slippery slope histrionic is the sound of the last gasp of privilege and entitlement refusing to surrender.

The only reason for refusing to open your mind to the perspective of others not like you is if you refuse to change because you want to force them to live in a world tailored to your advantage and comfort.

Those who have matured beyond this kind of infantile, selfish arrogance realize that the only way to move past the limitations and distortions of one's own perspective is to open your heart to those who have not always soaked in the same brine as you.

What kind of pickle are you? Can you make a Ulysses contract with someone unlike you to help you see what you've been missing?

You don’t know what you’re doing, and neither do I.

I have always been fascinated by the hidden depths and intricate complexities of the human psyche. That fascination led me into the field of clinical psychology where, as a psychotherapist, I helped people explore and find healing in those depths.

My fascination also led me to become a graduate school professor where, for 27 years, I trained fledgling psychotherapists in the foundational principles of psychodynamic psychology.
Unlike other psychologies that approach the psyche primarily from the superficial conscious level of experience, psychodynamic psychology is based on the understanding that we have unconscious depths. There is no such thing as a pure, unadulterated, or objective human perception or experience. Every moment of our lives we are being influenced by forces, internal and external, conscious and unconscious, that push us in one direction or another   These forces might be as simple as the signal from my stomach that tells me I am hungry or as complex as the "Signal" from my wife that tells me I'd better make my own dinner.

Consequently, the question is never "have the things I think I know been influenced by forces outside my awareness" but, rather, "to what extent have the things I think I know been influenced by forces outside my awareness." This flies in the face of the universal human inclination to trust one's own mind above all else. We all know that our minds can be deceived, but the average person is incapable of discerning when that has happened.
We are convinced by our experiences of certainty despite the fact that certainty is an emotion and, like all emotions, easily manipulated. Certainty is something you feel, not something you "have" or attain. It is based at least as much in neurochemistry as in facts or evidence. In fact, a feeling of certainty carries absolutely no authority.

Here’s an illustration. After the tragedy at Charlottesville, I was having coffee with  a friend when he said: "it's too bad those liberal protesters had to start all that violence." I challenged him and he insisted he was absolutely certain that this was true because there was video surveillance footage. I let it go, but the next day I asked if he had sources that I could look at. He blustered about me not trusting his judgment but then relented and promised to send the weblinks via email. I was surprised but waited with eager anticipation for a new perspective.

When no email arrived after a week, we met for coffee again. When I asked he quickly admitted he had lied about the video but insisted that the lie was completely justified. “You have been brainwashed by the liberal media,” he explained, “so you are incapable of seeing the obvious truth.” He, on the other hand, has been listening to authoritative "people in the know" for years. These sources say that it happened as he said. He felt it was urgent to "save" me from my ignorance so he lied, hoping my feelings for him would be enough to convince me of the truth. In all sincerity, he lied to me to get me to believe what he felt certain to be true. Needless to say, I will never trust my friend's feelings of certainty again, but I was able to forgive him and salvage our friendship. I could do that because I, too, have been "that guy" in more ways than one.

I spent 50 years immersed in a very dogmatic Evangelical subculture in which being right was more important than virtually anything else. In fact, being right in one's theological beliefs separated the "real Christians" from everyone else and determined whether or not one was going to heaven. Absolute certainty was a requirement and anything less was considered lack of faith. I remember with deep regret innumerable times that I dismissed or disrespected others because I felt certain I was right and they were wrong. As an adult, I began examining my heart and realized that there were many things I said that I believed with absolute certainty when, in fact, I had never been allowed to come to those beliefs through the usual questions and doubts. I knew I would be shamed, shunned, and ridiculed if I did not say that I believed these things. I remember concluding that someone more qualified than I must have determined that they were true.

When I was a professor, my favorite class every year was the one in which I started by projecting the following statement at the front of the room: "what you call your "faith" is a collection of illusions that you have constructed to protect yourself from your existential fears." I would read the statement aloud and then sit down on the desk at the front of the room to scan the students' faces. In my first year of teaching, the first thing I noticed was that some of the students were grinning at me. These were the students who had come to graduate school for exactly this kind of discussion. They were ready to dive in. I also noticed faces that looked more worried, or even angry. In fact, the very first time, a middle-aged woman in the back row quickly snatched up her belongings and rushed out the door. I followed her into the hallway where she told me with real fear in her voice that she had been thinking such questions all her life but knew that if she said them out loud she would be rejected by her church and possibly divorced by her husband. I did my best to assure her that, while I could not guarantee what would happen at home, in my classroom she would be safe to ask any questions and express any thoughts without danger.

Back in the classroom, I would sit at the desk in silence. By this point in the semester, my students knew that I could comfortably sit in silence for the next two hours if they did not initiate and engage in a meaningful discussion. The first comments usually came from a student who, like me, Had grown up in an evangelical subculture. He, and it almost always was he, would often quote Scripture in an attempt to defeat the opening statement, the very definition of begging the question. Other students would point out the flaws in that argument and the discussion would be off and running. Over the years this discussion proved to be rather predictable because we had all been trained with the same  evangelical scripts.  As I guided the discussion the point would eventually come when a student would excitedly announce:  "I just realized, the statement doesn't say that my beliefs are false, only that I didn't arrive at them as simply as I thought I did!” This is the moment I was waiting for because from that point we could have a genuine exploration.  We could now explore the inner world of thoughts, feelings and beliefs and the unconscious forces that make it impossible for us to be certain of our objectivity. Since there is no such thing as objectivity the closest thing one can accomplish is a genuine curiosity about oneself and the sources of one's beliefs in an uncensored way. For psychologists-in-training, the capacity to observe oneself is the most essential skill. As my students and I transparently explored the forces that had pushed and pulled us toward our beliefs they were honing the skills that they would need as psychotherapists.

Like the woman who ran out of class many of the students uncovered fears associated with asking difficult questions, not only because their place in their religious community hung in the balance but, they'd been told,  so did their very salvation. The rules in my classroom were different:

 Doubt is not the opposite of faith, the opposite of faith is certainty.

Doubt is, in fact, a prerequisite of faith. Without room for doubt, belief becomes indistinguishable from delusion.

I certainly could not condemn my friend for trusting in his feeling of certainty since I have done the same myself many times. My strongest lesson in understanding certainty comes from my experience of disability from a major traumatic brain injury. In 2008 a small home accident caused a tiny tear in the interior wall of my right carotid artery. That tear caused a clot that precipitated a massive ischemic stroke in the right hemisphere of my brain. As I lay on the ground waiting to be found I felt an unnatural lack of concern or anxiety. I felt a great sense of certainty that I was merely tired and dehydrated and once someone helped me up I would be fine. Only later did I realize that I was experiencing a common symptom of right hemisphere brain damage: anosognosia, a lack of awareness of one's own disability. In its extreme form anosognosia can cause the disabled patient, even if partially paralyzed, to insist that he or she is perfectly fine. Perhaps the most prominent historical example is William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice who although confined to a wheelchair denied any limitations at all.

Although I am a psychologist and practiced in self-awareness, I could not escape the effects of damage to my brain. I lay on the ground feeling absolutely certain that I was fine until my wife found me and tried to help me up. When I saw the terror in her eyes as she looked at my drooping face, it hit me that I had had a stroke.

False feelings of certainty and deficits in self-awareness are obviously not confined to the topics of religious belief and brain damage. In fact, nothing could be more relevant to the topics in the headlines and In conversations on social media or around the dinner table. Like my friend and I discussing the tragedy at Charlottesville, most of us find ourselves occasionally shaking our heads in disbelief at the opinions of the people we thought we knew.

I remember vividly the day that I made a covenant committing myself to accept others' feedback about my limitations. It was soon after my stroke while I was in intensive care. I needed to have a bowel movement so two orderlies carried me from my bed and placed me on a commode. One handed me a roll of toilet paper and said: "you ok?" I nodded and they left. It hadn't occurred to me that I would be anything but ok, At age 46 I had been wiping my own butt for a long time and I felt fine. But after they left I lost my balance and fell to the floor. Thankfully only my pride was injured when the commode tipped over and spilled on top of me. The next day my surgeon called the two orderlies into my room where he berated them for leaving a stroke patient in such a dangerous situation. I remember the awful feeling in my gut as he shouted at them "you don't ask the patient if he is okay trying something unassisted, We decide if he is ready for that!"  At that moment I vowed to never hide from awareness of anything about myself. Realizing that my brain injury limited my awareness, I made a Ulysses contract with my wife.

In Homer's Iliad Ulysses wanted to hear the beautiful songs of the sirens although he knew they would drive him insane and destroy him and his crew. He made a pact with his sailors that they would tie him to the mast and not let him loose no matter how much he begged. They would fill their ears with beeswax so only he would hear the beautiful but deadly music. He instructed them to kill him If he broke loose. Ulysses contracts are sometimes made by those with severe mental illness in which they instruct their loved ones to force them to receive treatment in the future if they experience a severely debilitating episode.  I told my wife that the day would likely come when I would not accurately see my own limitations, so I made a covenant to seek and trust feedback from her or others close to me regarding the evaluation of my capacity.

The first test came when she refused to let me drive. It took three years before I improved enough to regain my license. However, the biggest test of my commitment to that contract came 8 years after my stroke when my faculty colleagues told me "we think it is time for you to move on and let someone else take your place." 

I have a Ulysses moment whenever my friends of color—or white women for that matter—tell me what it is like to survive in this culture designed to preserve white male privilege and promote white supremacy. They have to understand me better than I understand myself so they can live in a world designed for me. They must be winsome and non-threatening while also stroking white male egos, finding a tolerable balance between showing the deference expected by those in power and maintaining self-respect.  I used to tell my students "until you have been out of the brine you don't know that you are a pickle." For most of my life, I was unaware that the world operates differently for me than for women and people of color. It was just the world, not my world. It seems so naive now, but I used to think “everyone gets the same chances.”

Now that I have awakened to those realities, I am astounded by the grace and patience extended to me by those wounded by my ignorance. Because our perception of the world is shaped and molded by race, culture, and gender we are, to some extent, "disabled" for living in a pluralistic, multicultural world. This numbing habituation lulls us into something akin to the anosognosia of a brain injury. We feel we know with certainty what is real and true despite the extreme limitations to our awareness.

At this point in the conversation (and frankly this is especially true of white males) people will sometimes throw up their hands and say "well, then, everything is relative, you can say anything you want is true." That kind of slippery slope histrionic is the sound of the last gasp of privilege and entitlement refusing to surrender.

The only reason for refusing to open your mind to the perspective of others not like you is if you refuse to change because you want to force them to live in a world tailored to your advantage and comfort.

Those who have matured beyond this kind of infantile, selfish arrogance realize that the only way to move past the limitations and distortions of one's own perspective is to open your heart to those who have not always soaked in the same brine as you.

What kind of pickle are you? Can you make a Ulysses contract with someone unlike you to help you see what you've been missing?