Contradictions and Conundrums

Our lives are blessed and cursed by our own interpretations, perhaps kept private.  Thoughtful persons know that the same stimulus will provide one message to this person or group, and another to that person or group.  As individuals and groups increase so do the interpretations of the same or similar stimuli.  Further, the intensities vary.  It is possible to love little or to love much, with considerable difference in the variables in between and the meanings.  It is possible to feel anger leading to programs to counter the anger producing response, and anger that may lead to violence.  Predispositions and presuppositions are so varied that without some exchange, sought in good will, there is not likely going to be agreement – the best feelings or progress that might be possible with greater understanding and wisdom in the process.  The failure to understand and direct the variables in the contexts of life lead to varied conundrums and contradictions.  For some situations, the next context is infected or blest by that which has gone before.  We may not understand a kind of dualism in a matter interpreted like one thing naturally and another supernaturally.  For example, families may feel that God has not been good to them in the birth of a handicapped child, but Scripture teaches that God is always God and loving in his person.  He also takes responsibility for our handicaps – Exodus 4:10-16.  God is a bit upset that Moses does not accept the circumstances given him, but turns them into excuses so to try to evade his calling – or part of it.  It took Aaron, the better speaker, to fill out the team.  (We can be honored of God even though imperfect.)

I look for the newspaper panel authored by L. K. Hanson entitled: You Don’t Say.  It usually touches on a contradiction or conundrum found in the quotes of eminent or obscure persons from history as stated in some publication or speech.  The June panel for 2014 includes the cartoonist image of a man (accenting the head) with the figure offering through broad open mouth and many more teeth than any human being ever had, giving advice emanating from a quotation in the writings of Herbert Read (1893-1968) here copied: One of the most curious characteristics of this people [Americans] is their complete misunderstanding of democracy. They do not believe in equality, but in “equality of opportunity.”  They confess that again & again, with pride, without realizing that “equality of opportunity” is merely the law of the jungle, that they are not egalitarians, but opportunists . . . With this the figure in the panel states: I stand before you today because I was given the OPPORTUNITY to buy, claw, and finagle my way to where I am!  And you can do the same if you really want it, friends! Yes! Yes!  Are Read and Hanson serving us with truth, or is the element of truth (requiring more words for clarity) to be mined from the dark statements suggested in the material, lost in the overstatements, or assumption of unproved, universal belief in some buffoonery?

Do all Americans believe freedom is so identified?  Do even a meaningful percentage of Americans believe it?  From my experience I assume most persons would define their freedom as doing what they want to do without hurting anyone else.  The law of the jungle has no reflective thought control in it, no external controls, like law, to govern it, no meaningful threats within the species, and other features of the differences between human and animal life removes the analogy as a sweeping opinion without support.  We misunderstand animals when we relate their clawing to evil actions within their species.  It takes a reflective mind to finagle.  We can easily continue to analyze the poverty and misdirection of the thoughts of the words of the panel.  That some persons claw and finagle, and worse, we do not deny.  It is highly unlikely that they would offer speeches supporting the ill conduct and disrespect for their specie, and also for those who see freedom of opportunity as motive for effort to accomplish meaning for themselves and society.  Freedom of opportunity, a subdivision of the freedom genre, is motivating in promise, is protected by law, and is not limited by chiefs, kings, dictators favoring their friends and family so causing limitation in opportunity for other citizens developing their talents for social achievement.  Certainly there are varied ideas of equality, some with greater truth in them than in others, but moves toward equality extensions continue.  We are grateful for Scripture that offers divine freedom to those whom God frees.