People Believe What They Want To Believe About The Bible

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I've recently encountered a number of tweets that deal with a similar idea.  I don't know what motivated each tweet, but the fact that they have a common theme is interesting.  Here are the tweets:

From Trevin's post:

How do you make a moral decision?

How do you determine if something is right or wrong?

Many of us think of morality as something we discover after rational and reflective consideration. You hear both sides of an argument, you consider reasons that may justify your action, and then you pronounce judgment.

But Jonathan Haidt says we’re getting it backwards. In reality, you judge first, and only then do you justify.

Have you ever had someone explain a Bible verse, and you know intuitively that their explanation was wrong, even though you couldn't articulate why?  It's because it's messing with one of your paradigms.  We can't always articulate our paradigms, but we know them subconsciously.  Your intuition may be right but only if your paradigm is right.  None of us has all of the answers to everything, but we all have some sort of structure made of paradigms.  It's like a picture made of mosaic tile.  The pieces that fit, we add, if they don't, we discard accordingly.  Some pieces we feel forced to fit into it, and so we jam it in wherever we can with mental gymnastics, but if that doesn't work, we're forced to change one of our paradigms. 

I recently posted on whether we recreate Biblical characters in our own image.  One of the reasons that I like mirror-reading is that it takes the focus off of my own paradigms and, in an indirect way, attempts to reconstruct the paradigms of author, the false teachers and the original readers.  One may not embrace or even realize the theological implications from the insights gained from mirror-reading, but I know some of my own paradigms have shifted because of mirror-reading, and I can't help but think that it makes me a little more objective when studying the Scriptures.

Header Image PHOTO CREDIT: [like caramel!] cropped from original