Several years ago I was standing in line at Walmart, when I noticed that the woman in front of me was having trouble using her debit card. She kept sliding it through the reader, but nothing happened (this was before the advent of cards with chips). After several failures the checkout clerk politely asked, “May I try?” He then said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry; this is a Hampton Inn room key card.” The woman was embarrassed, but opened a card wallet that contained an accordion like file of credit and debit cards; she could have played with Myron Floren on the Lawrence Welk show. She tried to use one of the cards, but the machine wouldn’t accept her PIN. She then tried another card with the same result. Finally, on the third card, her PIN was accepted and she was able to complete the transaction. She then said, “I knew I had the right PIN. I just had to find the right card.”

We, as humans, can have a personal idea, notion, opinion, or prejudice, and like the woman trying to find a card to match her PIN, we search for situations or reasons to make them appear valid. Here are two historical examples.
Before WWII the Russian biologist Lysenko believed in the inheritance of acquired traits, even though Mendel’s laws of genetics had been well established. For example, suppose a young person worked hard in the gym and then later were to have children. Lysenko believed that some of this acquired strength would be passed on to the person’s children. He performed “experiments” that he claimed supported this erroneous view. Unfortunately, he had the ear of Stalin, and the result was very harmful to Russian agriculture.

I recently asked a historian why so many southerners courageously fought to preserve slavery, when very few actually owned slaves. He gave two reasons. First, while very unlikely, they hoped that their fortunes would improve to the point where they also could own slaves. Second, ministers of the churches in the closed communities of the south almost universally gave religious justification for the peculiar institution of slavery. They noted that in Genesis 9:18-27 the descendants of Noah’s grandson Canaan were to be subservient to Noah’s other descendants. Also, they quoted Romans 13:1-6 where Paul says that those in authority are to be obeyed.
How do we prevent this from happening? It’s hard, but maybe we can limit the damage. We should have high standards of proof, and in religious things this proof should go back to the Bible. The more twisting the path is back to scripture, the more likely there’s a problem. When reading a Biblical passage we should try to understand the purpose of a passage and place it in a bigger context; we should not place extreme importance on small, isolated, literal sentences. Such isolated literalism has even led people to bringing snakes to church. Most of our own ideas and notions do not deal with the essentials of God’s salvation plan, and we should prevent them from becoming our dominant views. We should always remember the essential that God’s grace is freely given to all, because of his unconditional love for YOU and me.

Jim