How Not to Give Speeches

One political national convention is now finished with another to come next week. Watching and listening to the primetime coverage, the closest thing I find to compare it to is a stereotypical, religious, revival meeting. There was a token amount of attempts at appealing to those outside the party, but it was mostly about energizing the insiders and providing the necessary impetus to carry forward their mission over the short term – to get their nominee elected.

The speeches were full of flowery and fiery rhetoric, frequently without much or any support for the conclusions listeners were given. There was plenty of appeal to emotion, appeal to personality, appeal to party loyalty. There was little to no appeal to good, sound logic and critical thinking – except perhaps critical thinking to sort out integrity vs. misrepresentation and spin.

Earlier I likened the convention to a religious meeting. Suppose it was a religious meeting and the speakers were pastors and religious leaders. Would we allow the sort of speeches (referring to use of rhetoric rather than subject matter) that were given during the convention? For the sake of argument let’s suppose that all speakers were speaking truthfully. Would we want pastors to be saying things that could raise questions about their truthfulness, even if they were ultimately determined to be true? Shouldn’t pastors stay well clear of the edge and stick to things that are plain and clear? Some religious speakers do appeal to emotion and personality, but that doesn’t make it right and for Christians who follow the bible, at least how I understand it, those are techniques to be avoided.

Do we have a double standard when it comes to political speech vs. religious speech? Is that appropriate? acceptable? Or should we apply the same standards to both types of speech? Both types of speech attempt to persuade, to cause people to make judgments, to inspire people to action. I believe the same standards should be applied to both.

Both political and religious speech should steer away from questionable practices that involve attempts to manipulate information and people. Both should stick to use of sound reasoning principles. Excitement should come from truthfulness rather than artificial attempts to whip up the emotion.

If there is one thing I learned from the convention speeches it was this: examples of what not to do in sermons and speeches I give.

It’s Not That Simple - 2

Question: What is LIFE?

Ah… such a simple question. And a simple answer, too: “Life is ______.” Wait… okay, so how do you define life? Hmm… Maybe it isn’t so simple. I have a sneaking suspicions that the answer for most people is “life is what I think (or believe) life is.” Yup, a rather circular, incestuous reasoning.

“Wait a minute,” you protest, “I know what life is because ______ describes what it is.” That blank could be filled in with any number of options: a branch of science, a religious text, a school of philosophy, among others. But ultimately is comes down to, “I know what life is because of what I have chosen to accept/believe as an authoritative source.” Guess what? Your authoritative source isn’t necessarily accepted by every single human being.

Even in the case of science there is no unequivocal definition of what life is. Do chemical processes define life? Or maybe it’s biological? Or is it a combination, i.e., biochemistry? Does the branch of physics have anything to contribute? Science has come up with a consensus description of what what something called life generally shares, but that is far from a indisputable definition. It seems that even in science, it comes down to “I know life when I see it.”

If something as objective as science cannot form a precise definition of life, should we expect reliance on other sources to be any more precise and accurate? Perhaps not. Interpretations of religious and philosophical sources are far more subjective than interpretation of scientific data.

What precipitated this thought was the topic of “pro-life.” Now, if taken literally, pro-life simply means “for or promoting life.” I’d wager, except for a few sociopaths, no one is anti-life and all would agree they are pro-life. Is that how pro-life is used? We all pretty much know that pro-life is an euphemism for anti-abortion.

If the description of life was simply limited to the biological – e.g., a single cell containing growth and reproduction capabilities, ability to taken in food, ability to respond to external stimuli – a zygote would indeed be life, as well as a single cell amoeba, bacteria, spiders, ants, mosquitoes – and someone who professes to be pro-life would be bound to protect all of the above.

If the description of life was, instead, provided through ontology – e.g., the ability to think, feel, love – then only certain higher-order creatures would fit that description. Amoeba, bacteria, spiders, and ants certainly would be excluded. Cats, dogs and birds might be in an intermediate state. A human zygote… strictly would not be life, though it would have the potential for life if allowed to successfully grow and mature beyond some certain point. Ah, but what is that point?

The reality is that all of us combine the scientific and onotological descriptions of life. No two of us combine them in exactly the same manner. The result is that the description of what life is will vary between every person.

Therein lies the complexity of the pro-life/anti-abortion issue. Every person stands on a different foundation: some just slightly different, others vastly so. Even those who share sources of authority can disagree widely because of different methods of interpreting those sources and thus come to polar opposite conclusions. As I described in an earlier post, each person believes they are right and believe they are doing the right thing, but they may be in fact be wrong, and in complex cases no one can know for certain if they are right or wrong.

LIFE. It’s not that simple.

Hold on to convictions tentatively

The title of this post might appear to be one of contradictions. After all isn’t a conviction something that a person knows for certain? If something is certain, how can that person be tentative about it?

In light of a number of psychological, neurological, sociological, and anthropological studies¹ that I have seen recently, the conclusion I have come to (which too, must be held just tentatively) is that our worldview, perspectives, system of beliefs, and even what we “know” as truth is subjective to the “box” that each person has slowly built up over the course of their lives up to this precise moment in time.

Each box is different from every other box. Which means that every worldview, perspective, beliefs, and yes, even “truth” differs from one person to another. In other words, what I know for certain to be truth, the next person may or may not accept as such. Not only may that person not accept it as such at this time, he may not have the capability to ever accept it as such. And likewise, I may have certain beliefs that in reality, may not be true, that because of my life experiences, I may never be able to reject; conversely, there may be things that I believe as false that in reality are true, but I will never be able to accept.

Thus, I must remind myself: hold on to convictions tentatively.

I think and act out of my convictions, my belief system, what I hold to be true. But I must be aware that all the I know, believe, see and hear are limited… that they are only partial views into reality. I have no way to apprehend reality in its entirety, in its fullness, and unobscured by personal and societal preconceptions and influences.

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¹I don’t have links to sources, but to paraphrase some of them: 1) Our biological senses such as sight and hearing, when they go through the process of interpretation in our brains, are selective. We see and hear what we want to see and hear, and have the uncanny ability to filter away stuff that are “irrelevant” to us. 2) We are tribal in nature. Even in an highly individualistic society such as the United States, we form tribes: political, religious, philosophical. We believe and act in ways to further “our” tribe and defeat competing tribes. We have the ability to unconsciously ignore and even contradict fact and truth in order to promote our own “tribal” views.