Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web of Corrupt Leaders

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Critical Thinking: A COG Skill Too Far?



Ever, in the course of your WCG background and experiences,  wonder "What the hell was I thinking?"  Of course you have. I did and still do often. The fact is I wasn't thinking at all. I was emotionally agreeing, filling some void I did not understand or taking the easy way out. But I was not really thinking it through.  
A couple years ago I got scammed royally. It is still difficult to recite the details but I can assure you it was a major, "What the hell was I thinking?"  or better, "How did I end up not thinking at all?".  It was maddening and costly. It appealed to my good nature and naivete'. I knew such people existed, but up to that point, they had not appeared to me. Until they did. To sum it up, during the course of being scammed, I suspended critical thinking which would have saved me. I failed to do a few simple things that would have prevented it while it was going on but the pace the scammers kept me going at caused me suspend not clearly think of doing even the most simple things to expose what was really happening. These people knew exactly what they were doing, how they would do it and how people generally could be conned into participating without knowing what actually was going on.  

In hindsight, "What the hell was I thinking?"  The fact is that I wasn't. Only after the fact did clarity return and all I could do was chalk it up to taking an expensive class in trust no one, go with gut feelings and don't be so nice to everyone who calls on me.  Honestly, my brain has been reprogrammed to say "Screw you" at even the hint of an Indian, Pakistani or over-all foreign accent.  I was even uncomfortable at the bank the other day when the teller was obviously Pakistani or Indian.  Not fair I know but once burned and all that. Our prejudices are in direct proportion to our experiences. 
Personally, I was never taught to think critically of anything. If I felt it was so, it was so. I didn't know it was a skill to be learned. How I felt about this or that seemed good enough. In hindsight it was emotion driven for the most part.
Going into the WCG you could not have dissuaded or stopped me, though I wish someone had. There was not the information then we have now either on it all.  I was myself what I have come to call "a mere Bible reader."  I thought that was good enough. To Pastor at least it is not good enough to merely know the Bible well by a long shot. I knew the Bible well as a Dutch Reformed kid memorizing whole chapters at a time from the Second Grade on at the Rochester Christian School. 
To go to a mere Bible reading college didn't help my critical thinking. For that Church and College to be driven by "Government from the top down" pretty much put critical thinking out the door unless one wanted a visit, a talking to or to be dis-membered. One of my problems it seemed was the firm belief that I was suppose to be in ministry. WCG's or whatever.  My problem was that I thought as time passed, both I and the church, would mature in a normal way and when HWA died, majoring in the minor would yield to critical thinking as it almost did in the STP project, recalled by HWA as some kind of threat to his authority.  
In my view now, few COG ministers or members are critical thinkers. If they were such concepts as "Common", "Send it in", "I am___________ , you fill in the title , "we flee and you don't have to repay the loan," " forsake your non-church member family members and "when we flee" would be seen and heard as the dangerous and stupid commands and beliefs one could hold. I guarantee you in time, if you survive that foolishness your mind will come up with "What the hell was I thinking?"...
The term "faith restricted" describes the fact that critical thinking can only be allowed to go so far before it interfere's with faith practices which always come first.  The "Christian scientist" fits this category as do those who insist that science and the Bible are in perfect harmony once you know the codes.  They are not. 
Critical thinking returned with a vengeance in the mid 90's and aided by a deep understanding and appreciation for the scientific method of thinking a topic through, hypothesis and theory development and proofs has freed me of much ignorance in my past both theologically and scientifically. 
There is much to say and write about the why and how of critical thinking.  This is a start. 

How To Develop Critical Thinking Skills: 5 Strategies

You’ll often hear the term “critical thinking” without an appropriate explanation attached. For example, you might remember it as something you were assessed on when you were in school, or as something that you’ve been told certain people are naturally better at doing. The problem is not only that logic and critical thinking are often undescribed. They’re also frequently made to sound dry, dull, or of little practical relevance.
In truth, critical thinking skills are learned and sharpened over time, helping you to make better decisions, process information more effectively and express yourself more clearly. By honing your critical thinking abilities, you give yourself a boost in both your personal and professional lives.
So, what is critical thinking, precisely? And how can you become a better critical thinker, starting today? This straightforward guide will provide you with a great starting point, looking at the definition of critical thinking and working through five methods of improving it.

What Is Critical Thinking?



In the simplest terms, critical thinking is about carefully analyzing, processing and making sense of information. While it is often taught as part of a philosophy course (and has its roots in the work of Plato and Aristotle), critical thinking skills can be helpfully applied to any problem, subject area, question or concept.
It involves closely monitoring your own thoughts, paying heed to where they come from and how they follow from each other, and it requires a degree of open-mindedness.
In particular, good critical thinkers try their best to be neutral with respect to their own thoughts, spotting biases and prejudices and then correcting for them (we’ll look at biases in more depth later on).
What’s more, the latest research clearly shows that critical thinking comes with major benefits for all areas of reasoning. For example, someone with critical thinking can do the following:
  • Ask relevant, clear questions with a precise and limited scope
  • Methodically gather information and accurately assess it
  • Reach well-supported conclusions, and evaluate them against counterevidence
  • Display a consistent awareness of the limits of their own competence, monitoring for things they don’t understand or struggle to accept
  • Communicate with others in a productive, even-handed way that gets results, even when tackling complicated problems.
As is evident from the above, exercises in critical thinking are not only helpful for your career (e.g. tasks like conducting meetings and giving presentations). They also promote better relationships, enabling you to work through conflict in a faster, more self-aware way.

5 Ways To Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills


Now, as noted above, you’re not simply born with innate critical thinking skills. Yes, they’re easier to acquire for some people than others, but they can in principle be cultivated in anyone. This means that if you want to be a good critical reasoner, you need to remember that becoming a critical thinking is all about practice. Imagine it as similar to physical training! There are ceOur brains use heuristics, sort of like cognitive shortcuts, to make quick inferences about what’s going on around us. In many cases, these heuristics yield reliable results and help us get on inYou initially think you’re sure that the chicken is the one who comes first because the egg needs to be laid by the chicken. However, once you consider that the chicken itself needed to originate somewhere, it’s no longer so clear.
Thinking in reverse won’t always get you an immediate solution to a problem. However, it jolts you out of perceiving the problem in the same old way, which is often all you need to get onto the road to success. Further, flipping the assumed direction of causation is a particularly useful trick in relationships, one that discourages blame.
For example, perhaps you thought you acted the way you did because of the way your partner has been speaking, but what if they think they’ve been speaking differently because of the way you’ve been acting?

.1. Ask Basic Questions

It’s tempting to imagine that good critical thinkers ask erudite, convoluted questions when they’re trying to solve a problem. However, the truth is actually the opposite. The better you are at critical thinking, the more fundamental and clear your questions become. To enhance your questioning when problem-solving (and thereby improve your critical thinking abilities), make sure you break questions down.
Suppose you encounter a new problem, in work or life, and aren’t sure what to do. Start by asking the following:
  • What information about this problem do you already have?
  • How do you know the above information?
  • What is your goal and what are you trying to discover, prove, disprove, support or criticize?
  • What might you be overlooking?
These types of questions encourage you to get right to the heart of a problem, interrogating it for simple solutions before assuming complexity.
If it helps, try writing down the answers to the above four questions when faced with a problem, to help yourself remember your process as you go through it. You can use the same strategy to try and coax someone else through a problem when they bring it to you.
Once again, this shows how critical thinking is important from an interpersonal perspective, not just a cognitive perspective.

2. Be Aware Of Your Mental Process

People who assume they’re good critical thinkers often turn their analytical abilities outwards, arrogantly critiquing other people. However, being a genuinely skilled thinker involves a lot more self-reflection.
In particular, you want to keep an eye on your own mental process; where it started, what it looks like, and where it’s going. Our brains are incredibly impressive and can sort through information at an amazing rate, but this lightning-fast work can encourage us to ignore important factors.

3. Adjust Your Perspective

As noted above, being more mindful of your own biases is a great help in critical thinking. However, it’s only step one in a gradual perspective shift.
One useful thing you can do is read the literature on biases and how they operate. For example, in the field of “CV studies”, researchers show how identical CVs can receive different evaluations depending on whether the name placed on the top sounds male or female, foreign or familiar, and so on.
Meanwhile, there are is all sorts of interesting work on how situational factors influence our seemingly staple character traits. For example, we make different decisions depending on things like hunger, the color of a room, whether we had to climb a flight of stairs, and so on.
Just the act of reading about these biases and heuristics can help to adjust your perspective. Another thing you can do to help is to deliberately expose your mind to other ways of thinking. Instead of sticking to your favored news sources, read a little more widely. Pick up books by authors outside your culture. Deliberately conduct empathy exercises that place you in an unfamiliar person’s shoes. All of these actions make you a better thinker.

4. Think In Reverse

Thinking in reverse is another fascinating and effective technique, especially when you’re stuck trying to puzzle through a difficult problem.
The basic idea is that you flip what you think you know on its head. So, if you think it’s pretty obvious that A cause B, ask yourself “But what if B caused A?”. This is the structure of the famous case of the chicken and the egg.
Train muscles you need to build over time.
The following five exercises will all help you with the critical thinking process. They’re all about making simple but powerful changes to your cognition and monitoring them over time.
In addition to using these techniques, remember that any kind of new learning is equally helpful for critical thinking. Every time you read about something new, join a class or tackle a challenging book, you’re becoming a sharper, smarter thinker.

5. Develop Foresight

While one of us are likely to become psychic anytime soon, we can get a lot better at predicting the impact of the choices we make (and the things we say). Consider that good foresight is an asset no matter what you’re trying to achieve. Whether you’re at a job interview, trying to market a business or attempting to date, you’ll be better able to make the right decisions if you can already see the consequences further down the line.
How do you develop your capacity for foresight, thereby improving your critical thinking more broadly? Make sure you take the time to look at all angles of a potential decision.
To take the example of looking for a place to situate your new business, don’t just go with your gut. Ask yourself questions like the following: what impression does this location give to visitors? How many competitors are there in the area? Will it be easy for employees to get here?
Making a pro and con list is another excellent way to boost your foresight, making you much better at predicting outcomes. And the more you do this, the less work you need to put into your attempted predictions each time. the world. In other cases, they take the form of unreliable biases that lead us down the wrong path.
No matter how smart and thoughtful you are, if you want to be a good critical thinker you need to accept that you have such biases, and you need to learn to look out for them. Make a habit of asking yourself what you’re assuming and why, and checking for things like unhelpful stereotyping. Becoming more aware of your own biases is the first step to rewriting these parts of your thinking (though even the best critical thinker will never be entirely bias-free)

How much better it would have been had I known and applied these concepts and the skills related to critical thinking when I was a teen getting all taken in by the Armstrongs, WCG and the Plain Truth of The Wonderful World Tomorrow.  I will have to say that Gerald Waterhouse did provide the input that reminded me my own critical thinking skills were not completely dead and gone.  I would hope those subjected to Gerald Flurry's, Dave Pack's and all the one man shows of COGdom might feel the same rumblings and pay attention to them. 



15 comments:

  1. Good stuff, and should be available as a free booklet! LOL!

    Boiling it all down, to one sentence, would be that big claims require big proof.

    Hwa made big claims about knowing when
    the end times were going to be, and when that failed to pass, came up with big claims about being a Biblical character, like an apostle, or elijah and few others as well. None of those claims had any big proof to back them up.

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  2. Dennis- what do your critical thinking skills tell you about the choice to lead our nation?
    A man you regard as a conman or a senile politician who was not that great before he lost his mind?

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  3. This post is too long. I got bored

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  4. Dennis - maybe this one appeals to you more:
    Acts 2 14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. 15 These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! 16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
    17
    “‘In the last days, God says,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
    Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your young men will see visions,
    your old men will dream dreams.
    18
    Even on my servants, both men and women,
    I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
    and they will prophesy.
    19
    I will show wonders in the heavens above
    and signs on the earth below,
    blood and fire and billows of smoke.
    20
    The sun will be turned to darkness
    and the moon to blood
    before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.
    21
    And everyone who calls
    on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

    2000 years of last days!
    But alas, only Bob is prophesying....

    V21 should be the killer scripture against COG teachings: "And everyone who calls
    on the name of the Lord will be saved.’"
    And yet, we reasoned it away, by not using critical thinking.
    It is funny how we believed every word in the Bible without actually believing many of the words.

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  5. Jim-AZ said...
    Good post Dennis. thanks for taking the time to write it.
    Jim-AZ

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  6. Great post, Dennis! Thanks.
    -- Wes White

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  7. TLA is apparently quite new at this. He writes:

    V21 should be the killer scripture against COG teachings: "And everyone who calls
    on the name of the Lord will be saved.’"


    There's a wacky contingent who'll say that this doesn't disprove ACOG teachings, but that what it does is PROVE the importance of Sacred Names. If God isn't saving you, it's because you are not calling Him by his actual name. You can say "Gee, Zeus!" all you want, and YHVH will never hear you.

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  8. Excellent article on critical thinking Denis. I'm currently reading John C. Maxwell's book, How Successful People Think; this book pretty much touches on the same topic as your article. At the start of chapter one, John Maxwell quotes David Schwartz, "Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches or pounds, or college degrees, or family background; they are measured by the size of their thinking."

    Craig

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  9. That third recommendation, "Change Your Perspective," is all well and good.

    Just remember, though: everything in moderation. Lean left, lean right, bend forward, even bend over backwards if necessary, to look at things from different angles. But no matter how far you lean, always keep your feet grounded on the firm, steady anchor point of the parable of the talents.

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  10. There's a wacky contingent who'll say that this doesn't disprove ACOG teachings, but that what it does is PROVE the importance of Sacred Names. If God isn't saving you, it's because you are not calling Him by his actual name. You can say "Gee, Zeus!" all you want, and YHVH will never hear you.

    Yep, I guess god's ear is dull, that it cannot hear.

    Of the proliferation of theories as to why a nonexistent being fails to perform as advertised there is seemingly no end.

    There can always be yet another "and" appended onto the endless of the list of picayune rules and regulations one must follow before the deity can be bothered to hear you. James Malm is a pro at that, yet, curiously, rejected the sacred names theory? Human behavior may not be random, but that doesn't mean it isn't unpredictable. Consistently inconsistent.

    Yet David, who famously broke every rule, this god had no trouble hearing him? The alleged behavior of this god is apparently just as unpredictable and inconsistent as that of humans? But when humans invent a god, isn't this exactly what we should expect?

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  11. Dennis:

    This is a good presentation of the process of critical thinking. Now I will make a statement that is probably obvious. Even though one may exercise a critical thinking process of high integrity, one may still arrive at false or defective conclusions.

    This because our knowledge base may contain erroneous premises. Essentially, it is the integrity of the inputs to the critical thnking process that we also need to be concerned about. Epistemology then becomes the necessary companion to critical thinking.

    A sidebar: Because of this principle, I do not believe that comprehensive human freedom actually exists. We are all subject to forces and influences beyond our control. We all have our own portfolio of mistakes, delusions, misapprehensions and myths. This means that the popular Protestant idea that some humans will "freely" choose hell does not wash. (This is a Universalist perspective.)

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  12. 8:13am If all that makes you feel better after throwing everything that you once believed out the door then fine!

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  13. The ultimate message of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a simple one:

    "LOVE DADDY, OR HE WILL BURN YOU!"

    If BibleGod truly existed, we would be morally deficient if we failed to report Him to Child Protective Services.

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  14. 11.20 AM
    Look around you at all the creatures and vegetation that God has created. What does that tell you about His nature? God is not going to accept your nonsense on judgement day.

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