Bias

"Recognizing that the divergent views expressed by others are apt to be sincerely held rather than a motivated strategy to seek advantage can help to defuse the spiral of conflict. Recognizing also that the biases that influence others result from normal psychological processes - processes to which we too are susceptible - rather than some essential characteristic of the other group, should further be helpful."

-Ehrlinger et al.

From Peering Into the Bias Blind Spot: People's Assessments of Bias in Themselves and Others by Joyce Ehrlinger, Thomas Gilovich, and Lee Ross (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 31 no. 5, May 2005, 680-692).

Debates, loneliness, darkness, locusts, Jesus, and the Scum of the Earth

It seems like every time I've turned around this week, I've been in an argument. Not intentionally, mind you. It just seems like every time I try to express my opinion on something, I have at least two people ready to turn my simple statement of preference in to an argument.

Not that I mind it so much... a good debate has always been fun to me. But sometimes I just wish someone would say, "oh, I totally get where you're coming from," and actually agree wholeheartedly with me on something without feeling the need to then subsequently engage in a lively debate.

It's sort of like that whole "waiting your turn to talk" thing. I hate doing that. So, I just stopped volunteering information about myself altogether in pretty much any conversation where I feel like that happens. And do my conversation partners notice? Of course not. They're just interested in hearing themselves speak, so they're getting precisely what they want out of the conversation. And I'm happy to give it to them. I'll listen. I'll try to understand. I'll try to help where I can (and when appropriate). And, as a matter of fact, I do enjoy doing it.

But there is, of course, still a part of me that just wants someone else to listen to me for a change. To try and get inside my head for once. To try to see the dark, dying world through my eyes. To walk a mile in my shoes. You know how it goes.

But, for some reason, each time I try to just share a little bit of what I see in the world, I invariably end up with an argument on my hands, warranted or not. I get pretty surprised by it sometimes, as I think I'm just tossing out a benign opinion. And then WHAM! A debate springs up.

There is one such instance of attempted sharing that rises to mind tonight.

So I have what my girlfriend calls a tendency to gravitate towards the darker, scarier things in the world. I like horror movies, I listen to hard rock, I like to collect action figures of monsters, I'm fascinated by the sinful human condition, I'm fascinated by folk tales of monsters and ghosts, and I have what some might term a fairly cynical outlook on the human race.

It was strange tonight... during my bible study, I made the comment that I saw God's justice in the swarms of locusts described in Joel chapter 1, and that I found great security in that. My companions were outright horrified. Immediately, I had a group of guys trying to get to the bottom of how on earth I could see Justice in what they said was a situation where bad things were happening to Israel for no fault of their own.

I kept trying to explain to them that when I saw images like swarms of locusts obliterating an entire nation's crops, when I read about God's glory coming down and touching the mountains so that they smoke, and how the day of the Lord will be a dark and terrible day shrouded in shadow, I don't just see terror and fear and despair.

No, I see a God who is worth worshipping.

My favorite stories about Jesus are the ones that talk about the types of people he spent his time with. Specifically, he tended to seek out and spend time with fishermen, prostitutes, tax collectors, and rebels fighting against the Roman occupation of Israel.

If you were to put all of those various types of people in to a modern context, Jesus sought out and spent time with rednecks, porn stars, IRS employees, and terrorists.

He loved them, cared for them, healed their sicknesses, and taught them about the Kingdom of God when the religious leaders of their day completely and totally abandoned them, along with the rest of society.

So, yes... I do find great comfort even when I see the hand of God unleashing plagues and disaster. I know that the blood of the New Covenant speaks a better promise than the blood of Abel. I know that God is not going to go back on his promise that those who believe in him will not perish. I know that even these seeming terrors, horrors, and disasters will ultmately work out for the Glory of God in spite of the fact that they caused so much death. Everywhere I look, everywhere I turn, no matter how hard I have tried to ignore it, I see the Grace of God at work in the world... especially in the places where others seem to not see it the most.

And I suppose that is why what I said set off my compatriots the way it did. It is difficult to communicate the complicated emotion I get when I read about God's wonders in the Old and New Testament. And I also suppose I didn't do the best job of trying to explain it to them.

I see now that the thing I was trying to convey to them could only rightly be communicated by falling on my face like a dead man.

Who the hell is Lee? -or- Evangelism Rant part 3

In response to David Bryan's question regarding the identity of the "Lee" person mentioned in my previous evangelism rant, I have produced this continuation of that same rant. It began simply enough as an explanation of who Lee was, but it has, instead, blossomed in to another component of my ongoing soapbox tirade against what I believe are crappy evangelism techniques. Mr. David Bryan, here is the answer to your question:

The "Lee" in question was the poor student the people running the T-shirt campaign selected as their frontman.

The campaign works like this: Students start wearing the mysterious "I agree with So-and-so" t-shirts around campus on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, they buy out an entire page of the student newspaper and run a massive ad that is basically So-and-so's written testimony and their confession of faith. Suddenly, the campus understand what the t-shirts mean, and supposedly they will start "conversations" that would hopefully "result" in the "conversion" of "many" "people" to "Christianity".

Instead, it just alienated the hell out of everyone and started a bunch of fights.
But anyway, on Friday they have a big get together where So-and-so speaks (wearing a baseball cap that says "I am so-and-so", and they all talk about how they've made a huge impact and changed the campus and the world for the better by wearing t-shirts and starting fights with people.

Oh, they also had a mid-week forum where people could go and ask questions of the t-shirt wearers to learn about their faith. The ministry had the "good" "sense" enough to pick the most combative, hateful, unfriendly Christian on campus (who routinely hopped from ministry to ministry creeping people out, starting lots of fights, making lots of girls cry by badgering them (not an exaggeration), and judging everyone who didn't see things exactly his way) to be the moderator for the "forum" discussion. You can imagine how that wound up going.
The general response from the student body was one of, "who the hell cares," and, "man, Christians are dumb and irritating," and, "why does everyone who's wearing a shirt look like they're the type of people who are a few cards short of a full deck?" That last one is an actual quote I heard from someone concerning the general attitude the shirt wearers seemed to give off.

But the best part is when people started making their own t-shirts, including "I agree with Satan" and "F*** Lee".

So, yes. It wasn't exactly a "smashing success", and in the end just gave the general population another reason to think Christians were both ignorant and irritating.
And yes, I really did get in to a fight with a certain campus minister about the campaign, warning him that it would not go over well with the student body. Why? Because of the first rule of speaker-audience communication: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. The people at The University of Kansas, in general, don't take well to flaky evangelism. Why? Most of them grew up in the bible-belt, and have been more or less inoculated against shallow pseudo-Christian claptrap. Not to mention the fact that Fred Phelps regularly pickets the campus during the school year, traveling preachers frequently get up on Wescoe beach and yell at the students about how they're all going to hell, and the school also just happens to be one of the primary stages for the massive Creationism/Evolution debate, making it a Mecca for pro-Creationist protesters to show up with signs and join Fred and the traveling preachers in yelling at the students. (When I went to see Phillip Johnston speak, for example, a group was actually handing out pamphlets advertising the "fact" that the world was flat. Seriously. They were protesting science because science taught that the world is round. For real.) Sadly, the minister did not see it that way, and chose to ignore the nature of the audience he was trying to reach.

When it all comes down to it, people aren't looking for you to give them a slogan or a formula or a new t-shirt to buy. Instead, shock of all shocks, people are looking for hope, friendship, kindness, encouragement, comfort, honesty, intelligence, and a sense of humor. Basically, they're looking for you to be a real human being to them. They crave it, in fact, as many people have only ever known others to be selfish, deceptive, dangerous, hurtful, abusive, liars, and thieves. And when you show them a little of what real honesty and love is like, well, they tend to snap to attention. Well, more than that, they look at you as a person because you've already shown them that they are a person to you.

And finally, between people, the Gospel can be shared in a way where the person will have to deal with the truly offensive subject matter that should really make people not like Christians: Jesus Himself.

Dental Floss

OK... I just had the most unusual dining experience ever.

I went with some of the other first years to a Chinese restaurant that we had never tried before tonight for dinner. I ordered orange chicken. So far, so good. They brought out some plates for us. Oh, wait. There were not enough plates, and two of the plates they did bring out had a sugar packet burnt onto their surface so that they stuck together. A little weird, but not awful.
The waitresses were really inattentive, too. Ok, so they won't be getting a tip. At least the food was pretty good.

Well, it was until right when I was finishing up my orange chicken and discovered a bright blue ribbon of dental floss buried under some of the pieces.

Yes, dental floss.

Yes, I'm sure.

It was dental floss.

Dental. Floss.

I was so stunned that I picked it up and held it in front of my face just to make sure. Slowly, my compatriots stopped eating and started staring.

"Dude, where did you get that?"

"It was in my chicken."

"No way."

"Yes, that's where it came from."

"Is it string?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Well, it's both flat and waxy. Sort of like dental floss."

"Dental floss?"

"Dental floss."

"Dental floss!"

Yes, dental floss.

Ok, I've had some bad dining experiences before. One time my family and I discovered a used hypodermic needle underneath our table at an Italian restaurant. Another time, we waited an hour before being seated... long after everyone who came in half an hour after us had been seated... and then the food we got took another hour to not show up before we stormed out of there. Another time, there was a living, crawling caterpillar in my salad. Just recently, in a small place in Oregon, there was a deep-fried housefly underneath my French-fries.
These mishaps I can understand. Sometimes people drop the ball when it comes to seating. Sometimes flies just get too close to the frier. Other times, caterpillars, animals that like to eat plants, end up on plants that we humans also just happen to eat. I do not hold the food industry to a perfect standard by any stretch of the means. Hell, I even forgave the fly incident graciously.

But DENTAL FLOSS?

Here's where I have to just step back and go "WHAT THE HELL?!?!"

Here's why.

In the basic hustle and bustle of a restaurant, how the hell does dental floss factor in to it all? Sure, some picky customers with OCD might floss after a meal in public, and the floss may be left on the plate. But would not that have been washed off or simply baked on to the plate rather than mixed in with my orange chicken?

Through no mishap of customer did this floss make it in to the place that it did on my chicken. The error had to have occurred in the kitchen.

But what the hell do you use dental floss for in a Chinese kitchen? Perhaps it is used for wrapping up meat in a certain way, or is used to tie together vegetables in a manner that I am entirely ignorant of, and if Knarf, who has had more restaurant experience than anyone I know, or SINGAPORE, who is from Singapore, can possibly offer some enlightenment to such a cooking technique, I would be completely pacified and will let the whole thing slide.
But barring such an unknown cooking procedure, the offending item, one strand of dental floss, makes absolutely NO sense as a useful object in a Chinese kitchen.

This leads my line of thought down a darker, more sinister path... the path that, in my mind, unfortunately, is the most likely to be the most accurate: The floss wound up in my chicken through some accident of good oral hygiene and poor awareness of where one throws things he or she is finished using and needs to discard.

More simply, someone was flossing in the kitchen. When they were finished, they decided to pull a Kobe Bryant and "shoot" the floss in the general direction of the trashcan. Unlike Kobe Bryant, they were most likely not looking where they were throwing it, and it wound up in one of two places: 1. Directly in the pot of chicken (and if that is the case, why the hell is it so close to the trash can?) or 2. Directly on something that was on its merry way in to the pot of chicken.

In either case, we have two more disturbing problems to contend with:

1. Why was the pot of chicken so darn close to the trash can?

2. Why didn't the cook or whomever look at the whatever that was bound to enter the pot of
chicken?

If the whatever was some sort of bowl of sauce, I could see how it, perhaps, was not examined in the fullest.

But, for whatever reason, a piece of dental floss wound up in my orange chicken.

And yes, I am pretty darn certain it was dental floss.

Dental floss.

You see, this is not simply gross. It is also funny as hell.

I mean... DENTAL FLOSS! The mind just buckles trying to think how it could have wound up where it did!

But I digress. I flagged down a waitress, who promptly ignored me. Fortunately, another waitress was passing by and thought I was calling to her. When she saw what I was holding high up in the air for her to see, she said, "what's wrong, sir?"

"This was in my food."

"What is it?"

"Dental Floss."

Bear in mind I said the part about it being dental floss pretty loudly. Those of you who know me know that my voice carries well in a small room.
She tried to offer me more food.

I at first accepted, but when she brought out the fresh plate, I had sort of changed my mind and told her that I wasn't hungry any more.

For real. The portions were huge, and I was getting full by the time I found the dental floss.
Well, that, and when she took off to get me more food she just left the plate with the nasty little strand sitting right in front of me.

That was weird.

Plus, it was enough to convince me I wasn't hungry any more.

She apologized again, and took away the fresh plate, leaving the defiled, strand-of-mysterious-dental-floss-having-plate-of-foulness still sitting in front of my face for THE SECOND TIME.
Finally, a waitress, speaking in very broken English, came to remove the offending plate. But, of course, not before confusing the hell out of us and offering me with a chance to say, "YES, IT'S DENTAL FLOSS" very loudly yet again.

In the end, I did not pay for my meal.

Oh, and they continued to give us crappy service by the way of not giving us enough boxes and by not splitting the bill when we asked them to do so two times at the beginning of the meal.
That was by far the worst dining experience I have ever had... and I try to be forgiving about those types of things. Not so much this time.

At least I got a great story to tell out of it. I think that's worth the price of "free". ;)

Dental floss... a quarter moment for the ages.