Thinking about thinking is hard and most
people don’t do it. The Puppeteer runs amok and it seems that the majority of
people, at least in the United States, are under Its power.
The
Puppeteer is all of the forces in the world which would have you believe
whatever piece of information is presented to you, without question. For
example, when the preacher tells you that God is omnipotent and loving because
the Bible says so, that preacher is an agent of the Puppeteer and you’re a
victim of that power if you don’t question what he says. How is God omnipotent?
What evidence do we have that God exists, aside from an ancient text that has
been poorly translated thousands of times? How many times has the Bible been translated? How many inaccuracies exist due to
translators’ desires to convey cultural context over literal meaning?
These
questions are penetrating, critical questions that help us to think critically
about religion and what the preacher says. These types of questions are what I
am now exploring in my class through the University of Phoenix and I feel
fortunate that I now have the resources before me to take control of my own
mind in a way that I hadn’t previously considered needing doing.
The
Puppeteer is evident in Its work; we see It at work with the 2016 election, as
we are flooded with information from the different sides of the race. We see
Hillary blasted all over the television, Bernie blasted all over the Internet,
and Trump slandered all over both. What information should we believe and what
information should we toss as useless? The answers lie in the research.
Yesterday,
I did some research on Hillary Clinton. I discovered that she has a history of
defending women’s rights and speaking against the big banks, Wall Street, and
Big Pharma. I also learned that she stands by her decision in the 1975 rape
case that is often cited as a means of “exposing” her as a “villain”. The truth
is, she stands by the fact that she is responsible for the lightness of the
sentence because she fulfilled her
obligation as a defense attorney. Initially, she requested that she not be
appointed to the rapist; when her request was ignored and she was thus
obligated to defend the young man, she fulfilled that obligation, regardless of
how it made her feel or what the result was in the end. She was a defense
attorney and she did what all defense attorneys strive to do; she defended the
man against his charges.
Some
things I already knew about Hillary are that she did nothing wrong as Secretary
of State during the Benghazi incident and she has not been found responsible
for any loss of confidential information through her emails. In fact, all
speculation against her regarding Benghazi and her emails have been led by
Republicans and those supporting the Republican Party, such as Citizens United.
Smear campaigns against Hillary should not be any more readily believed than
smear campaigns against Bernie; however, so many Bernie supporters are willing
to believe that Hillary did something wrong with Benghazi and she lost
confidential information in her email scandal. These are the same Bernie
supporters who proudly tout that they’ve done all their own research and have
all the facts to make their decisions.
Why
are so many intelligent people so willing to sit back and just absorb whatever
information best suits them? Why are they so disinclined to dig a little deeper
in their research and find the real truth for themselves? It’s been touted by
Bernie supporters that they’ve all done their own research, but the more I
think critically about the things Berners share, the more I realize they’re
sharing false information almost as much as the truth.
When did our society come to so
value laziness and lack of critical thought?
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