From where do our belief systems come?
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In My Humble Opinion
Jodi McDade
I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving celebrating with family and friends. We DO have so much to be thankful for even if some days it’s a little hard to clear the fog.
We live in a country where our personal rights are protected by a constitution that was written by men who believed in a Constitutional Republic that was to work from the bottom up with “We the People” being the most important ingredient. So many people in this world do not have this.
Watching the news from China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and many other countries where their people are being placed in lockdowns, forbidden to speak out, denied human rights, living under oppression, etc., makes me so thankful to be an American. While we have our problems, and we are more divided now than we have been since before the Civil War, we can speak out and let our voices be heard. That voice speaks the loudest when we vote.
The make up of our new Congress shows the huge difference in our belief systems, and, somehow, I really think those are not coming from the same places they were when I was growing up. Back then our belief systems were developed by our families by way of the churches. Most people back then grew up reading the Bible, studying how God says we should live, listening to the elders who had lived through so much.
We learned our world history in school where we read books about all types of people and places. Yes, history is written by the victors, but there have always been ways to find the other side of a story. Then, you find the truth somewhere in the middle.
Where do we get our beliefs from today? I’m afraid they come from the spins that are put on things by the media – television, movies, videos. We used to depend on investigative journalists in the daily papers we would read. They were taught to write about the who, what, how, when, where, and why of things – not THEIR opinion of things. The evening news was the NEWS, not opinions.
Granted, we all need to consider the opinions from different people because that gives us the opportunity to hear all sides, BUT we shouldn’t only listen to one-sided opinion if we want to know the truth.
We no longer sit down and communicate with each other except in the company of people who believe the way we do. We insist the people in our lives think the way we do, practice the truth as we know it, and do not encourage each other to be open minded. I’m so afraid we are going back to a segregated country where we will never be able to come to understandings of each other.
We are too stuck on the topic of slavery to see each other as just another one of God’s children. But slavery originated in the Bible and has been part of human interaction since then. It is first mentioned in Genesis and several terms were used that meant the same thing – menservants and maidservants, handmaids, etc. Look at Genesis 12:16 and 20:14 for a start.
There were even people who either sold or sent their own children into slavery to settle debts or after being conquered by other tribes. It DID NOT start when people were brought to America to be sold to other people (both black and white).
Somehow we need to get past this and, after a long conversation with a friend, I think it must start in the churches. People in the churches have been calling for a revival for our land now for years, but where are we? For the most part our churches are the most segregated places in our lives, yet they are the very places where we as Christians can find people who we have more in common with than anywhere else.
Until we as humans created by God can come to terms with how He created us and why He made us all different, how will we ever be able to come together? Here in America, we have another bond – the Declaration of Independence that was to break the political bonds we were under after our ancestors came here for RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.
This country was not founded on politics; it was founded on God’s words and directions. Maybe we should try that again.
Food for thought from my opinions.
God bless you all – red, yellow, black, or white.