Beyond Divide

Laurel Hughes

Description

Today’s polarizing creates collective spiritual distress. Thankfully, the overlapping wisdom of faith and science can help us overcome both the distress and the divisiveness.
In these days of extreme differences of opinion, what ever happened to the WWJD test? Swamped by divisive culture, those who love God struggle to avoid sinking into polarized social norms. Yet during severe stress we are all susceptible to doing just that. So, too, do we suffer from the spiritual, emotional, interpersonal, and community consequences of missteps that follow.
Mercifully, our bodies are designed to excel at overcoming this brand of spiritual distress. New brain science findings are amazingly consistent with the faith lessons we’ve been taught all along. Beyond Divide and the Tools That Get Us There shares this overlapping wisdom, as well as how to use it to benefit ourselves, loved ones, and community alike. If we use the right tool for the right job, remedies for healing hijacked faith can be found right at our fingertips.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Living
• Social Issues
• Philosophie et théologie
• Estrés
• Polarization
• Self-help
• Stress
• Compassion

Informations

• Publié par: WestBow Press
• Date de parution: 26 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781664294493
• Langue: English

Extrait

Beyond Divide
 
And the Tools That Get Us There
 
 
 
LAUREL HUGHES
 
 
 

 
 
Copyright © 2023 Laurel Hughes.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.
 
 
 
WestBow Press
A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan
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Bloomington, IN 47403
www.westbowpress.com
844-714-3454
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
 
Scripture quotations marked KJB are taken from the King James Version.
 
Scripture quotations marked ESV taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.
 
Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from The New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973,
1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
 
Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
 
Scripture quotations marked GNT are taken from the Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition). Copyright © 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved.
 
Scripture quotations marked ERV are taken from the Holy Bible: Easy-to-Read Version (ERV), International Edition. © 2013, 2016 by Bible League International and used by permission.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6642-9447-9 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-9448-6 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-9449-3 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023904324
 
 
 
WestBow Press rev. date: 04/24/2023
Contents
Acknowledgments
1     Beginnings
2     Life with the Stress Response
3     Under-Recognized Pitfalls
4     Tools of Discernment
5     Recognizing the Spiritual
6     Science and Intellect
7     Intellect and Accuracy
8     Human Bias
9     Cogjammed Community
10   Compassion
11   Taming the Lizard
12   Interpersonal Play
13   And Deliver Us from Cogjam
14   Finding Your Formula
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Writing a book takes many days of hiding out in solitude. Beyond Divide was no exception. Special challenges—personal sagas I share on future pages—further slowed my progress. All the same, I’m thankful for the experience of this inspired personal walk. I feel blessed for the opportunity now to share what it showed me about the faith/science overlap and how that combined wisdom opens doors to healing both cogjammed faith and distressed community.
I thank my family and friends for their abundant patience and understanding as I blipped off the radar. I would also like to mention those who provided special encouragement: Rick Hanson, PhD, who first got me writing about cogjam; Don S. Otis, who helped me realize the need to explain cogjam to the faith audience; Mike Wilson and Bridie Cawthorne for useful early feedback; Josh McDowell for his generous time and expert guidance; and Jeannie and David Penney, dear friends, who were very willing to review early drafts.
www.thecogjameffect.com
1
BEGINNINGS
SHORTLY AFTER MY ALIGHTING ON A PATH OF FAITH, MY WALK DELIVERED me to a secular graduate psychology program. As might be expected, indoctrination into both fields at the same time made for no shortage of confusion and conflict.
Little did I know that one day, these seemingly opposing realms would join hands to bolster me as both a psychologist and a believer. Even farther out on my radar was the lightbulb realization that this unlikely union of traditional adversaries held answers for healing a grueling political divide.
Back in the sixties and seventies, science and religion were even more pigeonholed than they are today. Many who lived through those years likely remember how, at times, outright hostility reigned between the two. In spite of our having come a long way over the last half century, certain suspicions still run deep on both sides.
While I was still a novice in these two fields, viable mentors for my conflicted venture were few and far between. As a result, the educational voyage I’d signed up for at times left me treading water in stormy seas, trapped between colliding philosophical hurricanes.
COLLISIONS WITH SCIENCE
Back in the 1970s, I was standing in the cafeteria line with one of my anthropology professors. He had just returned from a major conference on state-of-the-art evolution research. Enthusiasm danced in his eyes as he shared nuggets of recently unearthed data. Apparently unaware of my background, he finished our conversation by saying, “With everything we now know, I’d really like to hear how Christians can possibly believe in creationist stories.”
“Well, you happen to be looking at one.” It was a bold move for my usually timid self. But at the moment I was stunned by the unanticipated joust, not to mention worn a little thin by the whole debate. Looking back, I guess I could have done without the sarcastic overtones. That was my gut brain getting into the act. We’ll be following that little guy’s exploits at length.
My embarrassed professor stood there in awkward silence, occasionally shuffling his feet. I began to feel sorry for his plight. Here he was with a foot in his mouth and no easy way to remove it, in front of a student no less. After all, his whole career centered on helping budding social scientists blossom into the next generation of experts, not ridiculing them or trampling their ideas.
That was the chemistry of compassion flowing in, something else future pages will cover. The result: my feeling of being under attack loosened its grip on the steering wheel. I shifted gears and began sharing objective observations, much as I would during an intellectual give-and-take with any colleague.
“You know, you’re right. Scientific study goes to great lengths to explore the question of where we came from. There’s plenty of data out there for big conferences. But think about it: Pretty much all those modern scientific papers about early origins conclude that life emerged in about the same order that the book of Genesis already described. The concept has been around since before the Gutenberg press. Isn’t this a rather odd coincidence?”
He still had no answer, perhaps a little stunned himself. But he did seem to be giving my ideas fair consideration.
I was on a roll. “And then, look at scientific method. We accept something as fact only after we can demonstrate it. Demonstration is the very hallmark of scientific method. Yet nobody has demonstrated advanced life emerging from nonlife. Sure, they’ve shown lots of tiny pieces that could conceivably fit in with the overall concept of evolution. But still, nobody has demonstrated life advancing from nothing. Based on how we do science, these pieces suggest only a possibility of how such a thing might have happened. For any other scientific study, with this level of evidence, we don’t call it fact or even theory. We call it a hypothesis that needs to be tested. Sometimes it only rates as conjecture.”
My professor could hardly disagree with the basic tenets of scientific method. And I’d certainly taken the wind out of his sails regarding the conference he’d so enjoyed. Later on I felt a little guilty about that part.
All the same, the fact that this empirical pothole had never occurred to him illustrates how even scientists may give in to beliefs based on flimsy evidence if the trusted colleagues surrounding them treat those beliefs as fact. 1 In other words, in spite of my professor’s substantial training and experience in scientific method, he appeared to have gotten caught in the snare of groupthink—another human dilemma that weighs heavily in today’s red-versus-blue discord.
COLLISIONS WITH FAITH
My early experiences within the faith community were not much better. On one hand, a fundamentalist community is a great place for a new Christian to learn the ropes. Its doctrine sticks to, well, fundamentals. Its reductionist flavor makes for fewer gray areas, which smooths the path of learning. Fewer philosophical bumps mean less confusion.
Unfortunately, black-or-white designations, while benign or even appropriate when choosing personal religious practices, at times wander into arenas where they do not belong. And yes, you guessed it—we’ll also take a look at the role of misapplied faith in today’s confused political atmosphere.
I spent my earliest days of Christian community carefully tiptoeing around a line