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.
