Dear editor:
What I find interesting is how individual humans tend to think that what they think, is right. They so often don't even entertain the possibility that what they think, might be wrong -- based on wrong premises.
Someone finds a cave with ancient cave art. Others who are educated scientists assume that skilled caveman artists did the cave art. They don't even consider that it may have been drawn by children left in the cave while their caretakers went to hunt -- that the drawings may have been from the fertile imaginations of children rather than a reflection of life.
Someone has a religious belief, like the head of ISIS. That person just knows that the world is about to end or change by a deity arriving. It just has to be what will occur; that person doesn't stop to consider that all the evidence of what is happening in the world might lead to a totally different conclusion.
Someone sees someone else doing and saying something; assumptions are made regarding the motives of the action and communication. That person doesn't even stop to consider that no one can determine the motives of others; most don't even know their own motives, and would like to think that their own motives were good -- that they were based on facts.
Most human contentions and fights are based on generalizations (as if all folks of a group are the same), assumptions about motives, about deities, about science, about superstitions. Racial hatred is based on at least one of these; religious splits are based on at least one of these; prisons are filled with either guilty folks who used at least one of these to draw wrong conclusions, or with innocent folks whose judges and juries used at least one of these to wrongly put them into prison. Police shootings are so often based on at least one of these, and those who are innocent and who run from the police use at least one of these as a basis for running.
Schools teach "rules," and only rarely, "exceptions." History is taught as if there were at most two different views, rather than far more possibilities and factors. News consists of a viewpoint or, rarely, two opposing viewpoints, as if life experiences can be distilled down to two perspectives, or just one "right" perspective. Marriages fall apart on such wrongheaded thinking. Such thinking produces writers who errantly believe that an issue is "science versus religion," as if "science" isn't religion; as if religion cannot tolerate or be based on science. One either believes in global warming as a man-made problem, or one is ignorant. No possibility exists for the world going in cycles, regardless of man's pollution, though tree-ring history indicates exactly that.
Genius inventors don't discover and invent based on normal assumptions. They challenge assumptions. Corporate leaders who defy assumptions sometimes lead their corporations to profit when loss is occurring almost everywhere.
Taking the Bible literally defies theological assumptions. Few pastors believe it that way.
James Wilson
Hot Springs
Editorial on 04/22/2015