Like a Child

It seems I am commonly discovering brilliant maxims only to find they have all been discovered before. But I am slow to learn in this way: I do not understand a proverb, be it the most painfully obvious one in the world, until I have lived it.

One of my all-time favorite episodes of television is a particular Community episode entitled “Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples.” It is hilarious and actually quite beautiful. I could rave about it for pages, but I won’t, I’ll just set the scene for you:

Shirley—baker, mother, Christian—decides she wants help making a YouTube video with a Christian message because “there’s no light there for the kids.” So she asks Abed—an aspiring film-maker who is implied to have Asperger’s—to help her make one. At first he declines: “As a Muslim, I’d be happy to. As a filmmaker? No way. I’m a storyteller, not a preacher.”

But later he comes back, looking very excited, and says he’ll do it. Why? He just read the whole New Testament in one night. I should remind you that this is a completely, 100% secular show, so it would be understandable to expect a swift lampooning of Christianity via cheap parody, and nothing more. But this is also a clever show, so it does better than that. Abed states that “Being raised on TV and movies I always thought that Jesus just walked on water and told people not to have abortions, but it’s so much cooler than that. He was like ET, Edward Scissorhands and Marty McFly combined!”

This episode is SO GOOD.

He could just as easily have said Neo or Batman in the Dark Knight or a hundred other characters, but that’s beside the point. What’s fascinating here is that Abed is seeing the story of Jesus for the first time. All he knows is a cultural caricature, but when he reads the original, it is fresh, new, bizarre, and enticing to him. Like when the book is better than the badly interpreted movie, or when you have heard about someone, but you finally meet them face-to-face and you are far more impressed with the truth than the rumor.

Abed, as a storyteller, decides that the story of Jesus is worth his artistic eye. He decides this as someone outside of and indifferent to the Christian faith.

I confess to feeling a faint, weird jealousy at this perspective. Abed, in this context, sees the gospel with the wide, hungry eyes of someone reading a thrilling novel. Never mind chapter and verse references, concordance checks, etc…Abed sees a story about an unlikely hero who speaks in riddles and whom everyone is trying to kill all the time because he threatens to upset the status quo. Meanwhile, he’s secretly a king who dies for his cause.

See, I always thought “become like little children” meant having childlike faith—believing easily and wholeheartedly—which I suppose it does. But now I am thinking there is a whole other facet to that. ‘Like a child’ means “encountering something for the very first time.” Fresh eyes. Curiosity. A willingness to be awed. A quieting of the mind and a heightening of enjoyment.

I experience this in small ways when reading a book of the Bible that I haven’t gotten to in a very long time. I’m surprised by something I didn’t remember or simply wasn’t paying attention to last go ‘round. But imagine not ever having heard the gospel, not ever having read the Bible, or—taking it a step further from Abed—not even having gleaned atmospheric or memetic ‘Christianity’ from the culture. What would that be like?

Also kids don’t just see things with fresh eyes. When they find something they love, they cannot get enough of it. My nieces and nephews would watch the same new movie a dozen times in two days (the rental period, obviously) if their parents let them. When I was a kid I could read the same beloved book over and over and over. Now my mind is jumpity, distractible, and a little skeptical. To my great shame, I find that I would often rather read a clever, critical, or sarcastic debunking of a book than give the book a chance to speak for itself, with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions. I’m especially prone to do this if I already suspect the book is full of things I don’t like/disagree with.

And this is what our society has done towards Christianity and the Bible. Delicious mockery and deft debunking, without really sitting down and viewing the source material with a clear and neutral eye. In Western society in particular, there are no neutral eyes towards the Bible. Everyone is approaching the faith neither as a child, with new wonder, nor as an adult, with mature and distant insight, but (forgive me, O youth) as teenagers, with bucking and rebellion against that which is familiar but not well understood.

In this way, those who approach Christianity and the Bible as wholly foreign objects are far likelier to see them for what they really are than disaffected evangelicals, shrugging agnostics, or those who really like the idea of having a faith, but keep walking a little further and further away from it for the sake of their comfort and preference, too afraid to let it go, too afraid to embrace the faith in all its holy fire. Lukewarm. They want to keep it in the corner of their eye while they inch away from it, because it makes them feel better. They daren’t walk far enough to see it from—shall we say—a non-reactionary distance. Indeed, steeped in Western culture, I don't think you can get that distance. Wherever we run, it will always be reactionary.

G.K. Chesterton puts it best in this (slightly condensed) quote from the intro to The Everlasting Man:

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place…the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts.”

“It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.”

“Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.”

Chesterton

This is what troubles me with the current cultural milieu. So many of us are neither close enough to love, nor far away enough not to hate. So we end up with many people attempting to remodel Christianity, gutting it like a house not built quite to their taste, because they are under both the shadow of the faith (losing the light) and the shadow of secular disdain for the faith. This naturally comes with the territory of a piecemeal, yo-yo-ing journey away from faith. Those who depart try to make the faith into something that looks right in their own eyes from that doubtful middle distance, distorting it in many ways.

Then there are those who completely abandon the faith but are still like teenagers reacting against their parents in the way that they talk about God, the Bible, and Faith. Anger, frustration, and contempt.

And we have a culture that thinks that it knows what Christianity is, but doesn’t. They think they know who Jesus is, but most really don’t. That is something that takes daily effort, and all you have, and a willingness to give up anything that stands in the way of you going home again.

I do not think Chesterton was advising anyone to give up the faith and walk as far away as you can, just to come back around…but it may be better than sidestepping to that intervening valley he spoke of and losing the truth by inches—death by a thousand cuts—so that you don’t even notice it has happened, and you don’t even know where you are anymore, and you don’t even know how to get back because you have distorted the very meaning of home in your own mind.

Best that we stay home in Christ, but that we pray for the eyes of a child. To see him afresh as savior and King, story-teller and revolutionary, hero and martyr, truth and way, bread and wine, flesh and blood, light and fire, resurrection and life. A blazing, thrilling story, and an unconquerable fact.

I want to become like a little child, for my heart to be circumcised, and to be made new, so that I can rest in Christ, but still have the of giddy wonder of seeing every fiery truth for the very first time.

Already Dead

A good long while ago, my husband and I were watching the Band of Brothers series, a dramatization of the wartime actions of Easy Company in the 101st Airborne Division, during WWII. I had never seen it, but I love history, particularly WWII history, so I was enjoying it immensely.

During the first few episodes we discussed the various characters—who are all drawn, however dramatically, from real men who really lived and really had these experiences—and how and why such and such a man would act such and such a way, etc. My husband told me that his favorite character wasn’t actually the calm, serious, eminently moral Lieutenant Winters—the ostensible series protagonist—but the almost silent, hard-bitten, rumored-to-be-ruthless Lieutenant Speirs.

Throughout a portion of the series, most of the soldiers hold this Lieutenant as a mystery, and tell semi-mythic stories about his brutal wartime actions. He is not the classic protagonist, but he is tough and enigmatic, and it is one of his lines that struck me as the most powerful.

In one scene, there is a soldier who is paralyzed by fear. He is hiding in a foxhole when he should be taking action. He is ashamed of himself, but he can’t seem to break out of the fear strait-jacket.

Lieutenant Speirs walks up to him, crouches at the foxhole and tells him the ultimate paradox: “The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function.” The reason that soldier had become useless is because he was unwilling to give up his life…to give himself wholly over to the task at hand.

Lieutenant Speirs, on the other hand, figured he was as good as dead already, and for this he was able to be courageous, decisive, and capable in the midst of a horrible and life-threatening situation.

This is the classic Christian paradox shown true in an entirely secular context: the harder you try to cling to your life, the more useless that life is to you. It becomes a waste. You become paralyzed—“dead” in effect, as far as anything meaningful or purposeful is concerned. Try to save your life, you lose it. Give your life up and you might survive, and save many other lives along the way.

True in battle, true in life.

More recently, I watched some films and TV shows in which characters—who were not the heroes—sacrificed themselves for the sake of the greater goal. They got no glory. In some cases they scarcely had names or faces. In others, they were the convenient scapegoat which enabled the Hero or Heroine to live. This culminated in my watching Mockingjay Part 1; I was struck by two scenes in which nameless characters took coordinated action against the oppressive government and, in so doing, ensured their own deaths. It was very moving to me, but I found myself resistant to this idea. Perhaps a few survived, but most of the people in those uprisings had to know that they were going to die. They were cannon fodder for the sake of the higher goal of defeating the Capitol. If they didn’t believe in their cause with all their heart, soul, and body, one might say they had just been used and discarded in a heartless and utilitarian manner. But they had to want to fight, badly, to do that. It had to mean something to them.

It bothered me. It had me wondering if I would ever, for the right reasons, have the courage to be like that: to run into the cannon’s mouth without having any hope of survival, or any hint of fame or glory, just so that someone else can get past the cannon to do something greater. To die quietly so someone else can live loudly. Would I ever be willing to be the nameless not-hero who enables the victory without anyone ever noticing or caring?

I realized that I always want to be ‘the main character.’ Because not only is the main character the hero, but they usually survive, albeit with a few cuts and bruises. It’s those unnamed characters in the gray background that die in spades so that the protagonist can scrape through at the last second and see what all that fighting and dying earned. Because if you die without seeing the end, how do you know that it was really worth it? How do you know you weren’t being duped?

I find this mentality—mine—a problem. Not only are we “already dead,” as Lieutenant Speirs put it, but if we’re obsessed with being the hero—the name of renown—we aren’t going to get anything done either. Our role may be small. It may not be flashy. There may be a hundred other people doing the exact same small thing. But if it serves the higher goal, does it matter if no one ever sees us or knows our name?

Besides, if you’re not willing to sacrifice something—or yourself—because you can’t prove right now that it will have been worth it, you would never sacrifice yourself for anything. It takes faith—in a cause or in person. In God.

It reminds me of Brother Lawrence, a monk whose duties were very low and mundane; he worked in the kitchen, and it was tedious. No glory. No grandness. No heroism. Just simple work that has to be redone every day (like the dishes, which are the most depressing and endless of chores). But he took “do everything as unto the Lord” to heart. He did scrubbing as unto the Lord. How was he able to do this? How could he be so humble and patient in his heart with such dull work?

Because he had already died to himself. He yielded his goals and dreams and preferences to the Lord. The result? His words and advices, written hundreds of years ago, are still read today and influence many. His small work was a seed and it grew great. I don’t know that he ever lived to see it do so either. He couldn’t guess that, in the 2000’s, a young man would read his words and decide to volunteer in a kitchen at a summer camp in order to learn how to honor God in that simple work. He couldn’t know that I would remind myself of Brother Lawrence at times when I am tempted to be angry that my work or my life seem mundane, or lack the glory and adventure that I crave. When I try to cling to my idea of my life, instead of embracing the actual circumstances, I lose. I am paralyzed.

How can we be effective—in war, or in life, or especially in the Kingdom of God? By remembering that we’re dead already, and glad of it despite the way it sounds. Dead to things that chain us down, tether us to our selfish selves, and our foolish plans. We’re free to risk everything, free to be fearless, free to do things small or great with all our hearts, free from the need to be validated by others, free from the need to prove ourselves or measure ourselves against the achievements of others. Because we’re not clutching to our life (or our reputation, or our popularity, or our fame, or our accolades) like a security blanket. And, unlike Speirs, we haven’t given up our lives to become hard or nihilistic. We’ve given them into good hands. God’s. And, if we trust him, we will not regret letting go.

“The best way to live above all fear of death is to die every morning before you leave your bedroom.”

-Charles Spurgeon

Archtype or Ectype: How to Tell a Counterfeit

I’ve always had an internal debate regarding how much junk I can stand to hang around before I stop being able to differentiate the good stuff from the bad. And is it ever worth it? How much soggy literature do you read before you lose the temperament that aspires to the higher, harder, richer material. How much junk food can you eat before it’s all you crave? How many lies can you read before you start to mix them up with the truth? It’s all good and well to say “I just read that book for a lark” or “I just wanted to nosh” or “I was just doing research”…and all that may be true. But will it eventually effect you?

Well I suppose that depends on the nature of the encounter.

My constitution, at any rate, is not as strong and solid as I would like it to be and that makes me vulnerable to counterfeits. Most of us are. But we don’t have to be.

I was recently made aware of a practical fact that—as it would turn out—is often used as an illustration for spiritual instruction: that counterfeit money detectors are trained by touching and handling and looking at real money.  tests include counterfeits, yes, but the actual lesson focuses on the real thing. The illustration is designed to show that Christians should focus on the real material—scripture, prayer, sermons—rather than spend our time drinking in misinformation from secular sources.

I did some brief research and found that this illustration is indeed based on fact. Counterfeit detection is not a literary compare and contrast paper, it is a matter of detecting deviations from a known, memorized, and highly particular standard.

I have seen this illustration criticized as a way of getting Christians to hide in a cave and never interact with anything they disagree with, or anything which challenges their faith. Since there are many Christians who do this (retreat into “Christian cul-de-sacs” and fear all outside contact) I can see the concern. But I don’t think that is what the illustration really points to. Because that would certainly not be a life of faith.

This criticism ignores the fact that, no matter your starting point, if you lose sight of the original that you know is correct, you aren’t going to remember what it looks like and you aren’t going to know anything anymore. C.S. Lewis said that, as a Christian, he often had moods wherein Christianity seemed improbable. But then again, when he was an atheist, he often had moods in which Christianity seemed very probable. “The rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway,” he states. And if you don’t want to remain a “creature dithering to and fro” you have to keep your heading. To do that, you have to remember where you are coming from, where you are going, and why. If you lose track of either of these, you are going to get utterly lost…or in the matter of counterfeits, utterly swindled.

So. If a person’s job is to detect counterfeits they are no doubt going to encounter counterfeits ALL THE TIME. Not only that, but the greater one’s expertise, the likelier one is to encounter some very, very good counterfeits wherein the legitimate features are mixed in so-nearly-perfectly with the illegitimate that it would be easy to be confused. How to keep from being fooled?

By keeping eyes on the real stuff all the while. Calibrate to the original. All the time. Every day. And by not feeding on a diet of the fakes, because those are going to show up frequently regardless.

The only reason to fear encountering the fakes is if we are uncertain what the original looks like. If you find yourself confused about the original when dealing with a copy, that is when you have put yourself in danger. From experience I know that ending up in that situation is not, as some would have it, the business of learning and growing. It is decidedly the opposite. It is the business of unlearning all functional points of reference. It means real and fake cease to have meaning, nothing can be distinguished between them, and no choices can be made regarding them.

The spiritual application of all this is rather clear, but is no easier for that. It is one of the hardest things of all. It is discernment, and—above all—it is faith.

“That is why daily prayer and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.” (Mere Christianity)

It isn’t a matter of what you encounter along the way. It’s a matter of what our meals are made of. What are we feeding ourselves?

The counterfeit detector does not have a conniption fit when he encounters false currency—be it cleverly copied, or just monopoly money—he sets about seeing if it lines up with what he knows to be correct in all its details. What he certainly shouldn’t do is try to use the counterfeit to measure the original, nor should he ever try and make purchases with the counterfeit to see if it will “work.” It’s his job to expose the counterfeit…not to try and feed himself or his family with it.

 

 

 

Room for Doubt and Rule of Fear

“A closed mind is a sign of hidden doubt.”
-Harold DeWolf

Doubt is an important subject to me, as I so often struggle with it. What I learned from my Mom from a young age was that I shouldn’t fear it, but explore it wisely. Well here is one attempt to do so:

 

Close-mindedness:

It seems as though the phrase “close-minded” is more widely applied to those who are religious than those who are not. The stereotype, if not the fact, is that a person of faith clings to their doctrines without examining or analyzing them, and the secularists or humanists are open to all options. I do think this happens sometimes, but I think that the opposite can often be true, and either version of close-mindedness (secular or religious) can be deeply obstructive to truth’s riverways.

There is a current cultural claim of being open-minded that is decidedly not. The post-modern young secularist has decided what the world is—it is what they want and feel—and anyone who challenges that will be promptly labeled “close-minded’ and dismissed. I find this sad and ironic.

It would seem—again, via stereotype—that people are more accustomed to the very notion of religious close-mindedness than secular, post-modern, or humanistic close-mindedness. Religious close-mindedness is an easier sell in our culture. Religion offers very certain instruction on morals, beliefs and behaviors and does not allow a great deal of room to maneuver away from those things. Most forms of secularism, per current perception, allow morals, beliefs and behaviors to be more malleable. Redefinition and relativism replace constancy and conviction.

I think that many religious people also buy into this notion, and can sometimes be nervous about having their convictions pinned down by someone secular, for fear of being called close-minded. Of course, the difference between living close-minded and living with conviction is vast, but that is another matter, albeit one not sufficiently explored.

What genuinely concerns me are not those creeds which openly admit that they are fixed, but rather those that champion, and claim to be, one thing—open-minded or tolerant—while, in fact, being something else entirely. The source for this concern does not arise solely from my desire to defend a life of deep conviction—though I do so---but from a chance encounter with a certain literary discussion:

 

Room for Doubt, or Not:

I love reading reviews for Young Adult (YA) Literature novels. The YA author and reader community is vibrant, interactive, and extremely internet savvy. They offer some interesting analyses of the works themselves, but also provide perspective on the young adult literary zeitgeist.

You can get more information than you ever needed, and I find the debates over various Young Adult novel controversies very telling. Often the debates seem more interesting than the works themselves, although that may simply be the fact that I am inherently drawn to controversy, and NOT terribly interested in reading novel after novel of paranormal dystopian love triangles.

For example, one debate surrounded a sixteen-year-old female character that chose a “friends-with-benefits” scenario with her love interest, versus getting married or any form of commitment. Did that make her feminist and independent, or did that make her fearful, selfish and unfeeling towards said love interest? Gender and sexuality debates are some of the most common controversies in the YA community. It would appear that this has much to do with the visibly high quantity of female authors, readers, and reviewers in this community.

Which brings me to a review of a book called “The Knife of Never Letting Go.” I should state right up front that I have not read this book, nor is this post ABOUT this book. It was about a small controversy which stemmed from it, and about how that debate was conducted, and what troubles me therein.

 

 

In the book review and the discussion it spawned, one reviewer was offended by the fact that, in the novel, there is a certain germ or disease that affects the minds and bodies of males in a decidedly different way than it affects the minds and bodies of females. This reviewer took this to mean that the author asserts there to be something essentially, or “qualitatively” different between men and women. The reviewer was appalled at this claim. Debate ensues.

Well fairly soon, another commenter chimed in with the very viable argument that there are some inherent “biological/physiological/biochemical” differences, and the author was not being sexist to build upon that in his novel. This argument was not well received, and most of the other commenters continued to insist that this notion that men and women are somehow different by nature is archaic and will throw us back to the Stone Age or some such.

The following comment boggled my mind and represents the death of any real debate:

“a lot of time merely implying that there exists room for doubt about something is too great a compromise”

I don’t want to be brutally unfair, but the moment my eyes came across that sentence I copied and pasted it because I could scarcely believe it was said. Neither the removal nor the addition of context does the sentence any favors. The blatant claim here is that the mere implication of any room for doubt is an unacceptable compromise. Apply this logic across almost any debate and you run into serious trouble. Ultimately, in this particular discussion (link provided here), the Implication is that there are essential differences between men and women, particularly physiological differences, the Room For Doubt is the possibility that those differences are in any way essential or immutable, and the Too Great A Compromise would be allowing this idea to be given a seat at any debate table ever.

I understand why the commenter feels this way…he fears the confines of “gender essentialism” and how women have been ill-treated and restricted by it. But fear is the key word in that sentence. No matter how good your argument, nor how valid your concern, deciding not to acknowledge and explore doubt is generally a fear-driven decision. And this is coming from someone (me!) who believes that doubt can be deeply foolish, deeply wrong, and can kill you if mishandled.

So why do I conclude that exploration of doubt is necessary and that this rather secular, open-minded, tolerance-advocating commenter is giving poor advice despite their good intentions? Because, as a person of faith, if I tried to dismiss every doubt about God that frightened me or challenged my understanding of the world, that would be implying that the truths I know, proclaim, and try to live by aren’t strong enough to stand up against the doubts. And since I believe they ARE strong enough, I HAVE to face those doubts without fear. I can’t say it is always easy, but I can say that it is important and I hold a deep conviction that I must strive to do this.

“Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe”

-Henry David Thoreau

 

Faith

The controversy regarding faith stems largely from the idea that it is blind…that the entire merit of faith is the very lack of evidence. If that is the case, doubt would be an understandable and frequent occurrence.

But I don’t think that’s the whole picture of faith. I referred to the siren metaphor once before on this blog because the tale of the sirens speaks to the importance of tying yourself to a conviction based on evidence—on genuine knowing—despite how the current sense, circumstance, or temptation tries to demolish that conviction. The knowing came first. Faith is the thing that keeps you from forgetting what you knew, when everything and everyone around you would have you do so.

As in C.S. Lewis’ “The Silver Chair,” faith is remembering that there is a sun when you haven’t seen it in a long time, and everyone else is telling you it never existed, that it is a product of your imagination, that it is mere wish-fulfillment. But you basked in it before, and, if nothing else, your remember that in your very blood-stream.

 

The trouble with fear-based analysis is that it’s “see no evil” in its worst sense; it’s failing to face the chinks, the failures, the confusions. Ultimately it’s failing to learn and grow. And faith is meant to grow.

Again, one thinks of the phrase “blind faith”, but I think that is something of a misnomer. Faith is not recklessly blind; it believes in what it knows but cannot see. There’s a difference. Doubt will occur…the difference is the manner in which the doubt is handled. Fearlessly, or fearfully? Moored or unmoored?

 

Advance or Withdrawal

A good pastor once said that when one experiences doubt, don’t ignore it. Take it up and bring it to God, not away from him. He stated that when we withdraw from Him—“to get perspective” we claim—we are not able to truly get free of other influences and prejudices. There is no such thing as neutral ground. To imagine that as possible is to make a great mistake. Nature abhors a vacuum, does it not?

The illustration he gave was of how we sometimes come to doubt the nature of a friend that we rarely see, until we get together with them. Then we are reminded of their qualities and our confidence in them is reestablished. Withdrawal from a person is not the way to prove our theories about them, whether positive or negative…we go to the subject of the theories and dive in. Then we discover if we are right or wrong. Never by withdrawal.

This applies to all fields of study: the field develops (be it physics, medicine, or the social sciences) when someone approaches the conventional wisdom with a doubt or a suspicion. If they are wrong, the exploration of their doubt will strengthen that which is correct already. If they are right, something wrong, insubstantial, or misapplied will fall away (i.e. those thing which are “but rules taught by men”). One can see this happening when Jesus challenged the Pharisees. The core of truth remained. It was only the religious frippery that was sloughed off.

 

Giving up the Rule of Fear

Returning to the debate regarding “room for doubt” and the issue of gender essentialism, one begins to see what happens when room for doubt is not allowed in debate. Truth is neglected on behalf of conventional wisdom. The truth here is that there are basic biological differences between men and women which influence certain parts of life, including physical capabilities, bodily functions, and (occasionally) actual behavior.

The prevailing post-modern conventional wisdom is that what you want and how you feel about what you are trumps all of that…or, more extreme still, that all of it is a product of “social construction.” Ironically, the voice of someone advocating a concrete, provable, scientific view is drowned out by the voices of those reacting emotionally, fearing the consequences of any hint of gender essentialism, even if that hint is borne by fact.

Doubt is hard, and can be very uncomfortable. But ought it not to be taken hold of and made into something useful? The difference between acknowledging or examining doubt, and succumbing to it is the difference between hearing someone out—really listening to what they have to say and considering it—and simply being batted back and forth by every single argument you encounter. The only reason to fear doubt is if you expect the latter to happen to you…which it needn’t. It all depends on where you take it.