Learning to discern this presentation is going to be about critical thinking and how important it is in your gospel pursuits. It's also very important in life. Uh If you want to learn more about this topic, I suggest you read the first few chapters of my book, teaching for Doctrines, The Commandments
of Men, where I give a um an overview of some tools in that should be in your critical thinking toolbox. And um another resource you can think about. There's AAA very short textbook called asking the right questions, a guide to critical thinking. And because it's a textbook, you can get pretty inexpensive
used copies on Amazon. It's 100 and 80 pages about and it's pretty well written. I was impressed by that. Um OK, let's get started. Oh, yeah. There, there's also quite a bit of this in the glory of God is Intelligence. My latest book. Um So check that out if you haven't already. So why is this important
? Uh It turns out that if you have a um a basic understanding of the gospel, you can only do basic things and that's not good. We're not here to uh learn as much as we can until we turn eight. And then just sort of freeze our understanding at that point for the rest of our lives. There are many things
in this life that require diligence to prepare adequately for. And uh you know, when Paul Paul Paul said when he was a child, he thought as a child. But when he became an adult, it was time to move on to higher things. And it's very simplistic to assume that somehow you can become like God is while still
having a childish capability. In terms of reasoning, it takes a sophisticated uh capability to actually acquire that level of truth or anything close to it. It turns out that with a a basic understanding, it's, it's very hard to learn almost anything of worth. And uh I just saw this actually today online
. I saw someone posted a meme where they were saying uh they were criticizing Christianity and saying what kind of God uh designs a plan that requires him to die in order to uh requires him to die, to activate some loophole. You know, if your understanding of Christianity is that basic? I, I talked about
this in another video, I know people who went to school for 20 years or more to prepare for their occupation. And it's amazing to me that we think that life and salvation would take less, less effort, fewer years of practice. But most Christians have a belief system that you could convey in about five
minutes or less. And for some reason that is what we judge when, when the world judges Christianity, that's what they're looking at. And I just find it totally absurd. The, the gospel is not simple. You can teach it on a simple level, but that isn't sufficient to save someone. It's just the beginning
. So anyway, um the more sophisticated, the idea that you're trying to convey the more discernment is needed. So uh I, I guess an analogy of this is if you think about Lego or something like this, when you're trying to construct something, if you only have the most basic pieces and they're all one color
, there are only so many possibilities. But if you have a big set with many different types of pieces, all coming in different colors, then the options are, are uh much more numerous and, and this is how it goes with uh ideas as well. The more options you have, the more you need to be able to filter
among them. And so uh we'll get into this and I have got some pictures to help us through. But the more open minded you are, well, you have to be incredibly open minded to learn the things that God knows. But the more open minded you are, the more discernment, you need to be able to filter those things
. Otherwise you're going to get derailed very quickly and uh you'll either be frozen in your current level of understanding because you'll be on an infinite loop on something that doesn't matter or you're going to hit something that really um it causes you to quit your pursuit because you, it, it just
took you by surprise. OK. Um And that's the last bullet. OK. Great. So, uh why is this important? Let me give you a really specific example, the topic of healing. It's something that people focus a lot on. Uh There are many pages of The New Testament dedicated to describing how Jesus did this during
his ministry. And yet we understand very little about it in general. So if you look at healing, you can kind of categorize the three phases of, of how people approach this. The first and most popular one uh is to assume that uh miracles or wishes and God is a genie. I've talked about this in another
video, I think. But um this is great because you have a cheery disposition. You know, everything is awesome in your life. You can just pray about everything and you know, God's your genie. So whatever you want you'll get. But there are costs to this approach. If you believe that, then you also kind of
have no reason to repent. I mean, you're already there, right? And also you'll never experience certain types of miracles. Um You can ask for anything you want, but you're gonna find that God doesn't actually give you anything you want. OK? So that, that's gonna cause a contradiction. This bleeds into
the second phase. You can believe that, that God heals everyone. Right. There are a lot of people who have this belief that if you just have enough faith that God will heal whoever, it doesn't matter what's wrong with Him doesn't, the situation is irrelevant. It's just about how much someone wants it
. And again, you have jury disposition and some miracles, but you're going to have requests that are denied. And when God doesn't heal that person, you're going to be in a pickle because you're gonna have to wonder what, what, what's going on here. Does God not exist? Or is there something fundamentally
wrong with what I understand? And uh that could derail you that could cause you to not believe in God anymore. It should propel you forward to ask more questions and discover something higher, but that usually doesn't happen. Another problem that doesn't get much attention is that uh if you encounter
someone who has uh more sophisticated tools for discerning truth, they will not for even a second believe anything you say about the gospel. So I'm, I'm, I'm supposing here that they're atheists or agnostics. Why on earth would they believe you? When just with a little common sense, they can take apart
your arguments for things because they will be able to give you counter arguments for your uh perspective, your incorrect perspective that God just heals whoever as long as there's in that faith. Uh and interpreting faith is just desire. So as long as you desire it, God will heal you. That's not the
way it works. And anyone with even a little bit of common sense is gonna see that from a mile away. So they're not going to believe anything else you believe about God, they'll throw it right out the window and you'll be the reason they do. That's not a good thing. There's a good scripture for that.
Uh One of Paul's letters and he says that these people's poor example is the reason no one will believe him. So that's not a good place to be. Ok. So the, the, the ideal perspective here is that uh you understand that God's ways are sophisticated and that learning the gospel is a lifelong pursuit because
there's that much to know you'll seek knowledge of his character because you'll understand that his character is not simple and it takes a lot of time and effort to figure these things out. The benefit of this is that you'll learn why God did what he did when He did it. And you'll be able to apply those
lessons to your life. And this is the path of sanctification. You can't become like God is without understanding why He is how He is, let alone understanding how He is. And I don't know why. But for some reason, we just jump right over all of this. It's absolutely amazing to think about these things
and to think about even the the people we set up is fantastic examples of righteousness in the scriptures. How little they actually knew about the character of God. This is incriminating, right? Because jeez, if Enoch didn't understand why God was crying because it didn't fit his understanding of his
character. And yet he was walking, he's literally in heaven when this happened. What does that mean for you and I who haven't even gotten there yet? And yet we think we understand how God is. We might want to think twice about that. The cost of this is uh that it takes a whole lot of effort. It takes
a lot of obedience. It takes an immense trust in God because you have to lean on Him instead of on your own understanding. And we say that and we think we know what that means, but I'm not sure we do. Uh it, it's like we're walking into absolute darkness knowing there are uh poisonous snakes and pits
and all sorts of traps. But because we know God's character that he's trustworthy and that he's good, even if we don't know what good means. And even if we don't know what we're trusting in Him against as we lean on him through that perilous uh journey, we can, we can come out where we're supposed to
be. And then this also um requires a willingness to be wrong, an immense willingness to be wrong because everything that you believe is going to be incorrect or incomplete and you will never be able to lean on your understanding of how things are because it will always fail you given enough time in the
right situation. OK. So what are some tools for discernment? This is just a sampling of some ideas to get you spinning on this. If you want to learn how to discern, you have to learn how to think about things in terms of premises and conclusions. So on the left side of the screen here, we have a set
of premises, there could be one or two or as many as you'd like, but at least one and then there's an arrow and that arrow means therefore, and then on the right side, we have a conclusion, you could have multiple conclusions. But for our purposes here, we're just gonna leave it at one. Keep it simple
. So it's really important to think about things this way because it allows you to disentangle ideas to the point where you can evaluate them rationally. If you go at this haphazardly or all at once or thinking of things as a whole or I've heard people describe it defensively in different ways, then
you'll never be able to tear, tear, tear, yes, tease these things apart and really evaluate them individually and, and on their own merits. So you absolutely have to think of things like this in this way. So the reason it's helpful to think about things this way is because you can ascertain your confidence
on the relationship that you pull out of this. So I've circled and read everything that could be wrong about your construction of this argument. OK. Uh And we'll go through these, but the point is that pretty much everything could be wrong. And as you're constructing this, it's not enough to be able
to describe the argument in this way. In other words, saying if this end this end this then conclusion. So if premise one end premise two and premise three, then conclusion, it's not enough to be able to describe it that way your description actually has to be correct. And I'll tell you what I mean by
that. So for example, if premise and premise and premise well are your premises, actually the only ones that are relevant to this argument because there might be some premise out there that actually disproves your other ones or at least disproves the relationship you're trying to construct. So for example
, here's one all observed Swans are white. Therefore, there are no Black Swans. People believed this for a very long time and then they discovered a Black Swan. And so it turns out that there's a premise here that is there exists Black Swans, there exist Black Swans. So the existence, if we added a square
here on the left side that says Black Swans exist, then that top box is now incorrect. Right. This might seem arbitrary and, and sort of silly, but a great many arguments are like this where they only work because people are conveniently ignoring the things that would make them not work. Does that make
sense? I hope so. And you have to, actually this takes effort. Right. So, we think of, uh, I don't know, we think of arguing in terms of, uh, and, and, and I don't mean with someone else just, just parsing out things for yourself. We think of this and like it's uh riding a bike and maybe that's a good
analogy. You don't have to think about it. You just do it well, that, that's all. Well and good once you know how to ride a bike, but until you do it's actually quite an involved process to learn. Right? And learning how to evaluate potential truth is just as complicated and much more important. And
so if this seems, uh, overwhelmingly systematic, well, it, it is and it needs to be and this is what makes the difference between people who can see that things aren't right. And people who can figure out that maybe they're good enough for now, at least. Uh it's a very important skill set to have in
it. It is not optional, it is not optional. And there are people in this life whose IQ is too low to grasp these things and that's fine. Um, they have other things, they need to do after this life to get there. But for those of us who have the capacity, we absolutely have to learn these things because
there are things we will not be able to learn until we've mastered this. And we are very likely to get trapped in uh ideas and beliefs that are of no worth. And we are also very likely to hurt other people in terms of what we do and don't do moving on. We should also test that the premises are correct
. Now that we could use the same thing before is another example of this. But let's grab another one. So here's one, Paul said, we are saved by faith, not works. Therefore, all it takes to be saved is to say, we believe in Jesus, millions of people believe this. OK? But it's easily proven wrong. And
all you have to do is look at whether or not it's correct that Paul said we are saved by faith, not works. You can pull out that one verse and look at it in isolation, but that's not the wise thing to do. Paul said a whole lot of things. And if you make the simple assumption that what he taught was self-consistent
, then this interpretation, this, this rendering of the premise is incorrect. So this relationship can't be true. And again, it turns out that, that there is uh a, a different verse uh in the book of James that says very clearly that we're saved by works. It turns out that both of these premises are
overly simplistic and they need to be uh expanded quite a bit, but we won't go into that right now. Your premises have to agree with each other. And in this case, they don't, so we can't go any further because we need to go back to the drawing board and better understand our premises. Premises are basically
observations and you can interpret what you observe any way you'd like. But that doesn't mean that it's correct or the most correct interpretation that you can give for the observation. So when we're doing this, we really have to take care that we're thinking about this constructively and rationally
and pulling things apart when they need to be pulled apart. Um You can tell you're not doing this when the conversation goes something like this. Well, what about this observation? And then you uh challenge it somehow you say, yeah, but, and then you come up with another one or if you're having this
discussion with another person, the other person does. Well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what about this? I call this, what about it? I, and you're never coming full circle in the feedback loop, which is that you have to deal with every single one of these premises and it either uh
strengthens your argument or it weakens it and sometimes it can completely dismantle it. That's actually quite often what happens but if it withstands the challenge, then you should keep it around and you still have to deal with it somehow. What if Paul really had made this argument and, and it was consistent
with everything else he taught? Well, you'd have to deal with that, wouldn't you? So, you'd have to say, you know, well, we're, we're supposing that he was completely off the mark. Ok. Well, then how do you explain all the miraculous experiences he had because clearly he was doing something right? And
so on, it's complicated stuff. That's the point. But if you can master the, the framework, the, in this book, I referred you to asking the right questions, I recommend it if you've never thought about these things before, it's very thorough and uh specific in how it addresses how to do these things.
Um Anyway, so what's, what's another thing to check for? What about the, therefore when you're constructing this relationship, uh you want to know if this is the only possible outcome. Now, if it isn't, it doesn't mean that what you're doing is worthless. It just means that maybe it's not the whole picture
and you just need to keep that in mind. So take it with a grain of salt. So here's the four example. Uh there are many people millions on the earth today who believe that the book of Mormon is true because they prayed about it. And God said it was uh most of those people also believe that the L BS church
is God's only true church and everything it teaches is right, maybe not most many of those people. And so what their argument is, what I've got on the screen here because God told them the book of Mormon is true. And because the L DS church claims the book of Mormon is scripture, that means that everything
the L DS church teaches is true. And from God and that it's God's only true church. And basically, it's a blank check. Everything that comes out of that is what we should go for. And the question is, is this the only possible outcome? The answer is, of course not, of course, it isn't. And I can give
you sometimes um when you can format your argument like this one tool that you can use is you can swap out the premises and the conclusion for something that's not so close to you. And then it becomes more obvious what's what, what's going on. And, and unfortunately, this is an advantage agnostics and
atheists have when they're listening to the arguments of Christians over the Christians themselves, because these, these Christians are so closely tied to what they're talking about. They've invested so much emotionally into being right that they can't see very clearly what are what are obvious logical
contradictions or in this case, um They can't see other outcomes that are equally possible. So let me switch this all around what if on the left side, we replace this stuff with saying uh let's see, the Constitution of the United States was divinely inspired. Um And then the second block, we put the
US government claims to be framed by the US Constitution. Therefore, everything the US government does is in accordance with the US Constitution. So do you see what the, what the problem is here? Is it possible that everything the US government does complies with the US Constitution? Sure, it's absolutely
possible is that the case? No, it absolutely is not. But it could be. So the problem here is that just because the constitution is divinely inspired and just because the US government claims to follow, it doesn't mean that everything the US government does is uh would be approved by the founding fathers
. Right? Well, the same thing holds here. So think about whether this therefore is the only possible outcome. OK. Now, finally, this is just sort of a sampling of some ideas on this topic. Finally, I want to bring this up, which is the kitchen sink approach. If you're wondering whether you exercise the
tools of discernment or not, if your arguments are rationally constructed or not, this is the easiest test. If you think about things and explain things in this way, then you have some work to do. OK. This is what I call the kitchen sink approach. And this is, this is I'm going to name off a million
different premises that are only loosely connected. I'm not interested in digging into the veracity of any of them or exploring how interconnected they are or thinking about whether they're self-consistent or thinking about whether or not I'm interpreting them in a meaningful correct way. And I'm just
gonna jump right to this, this medley of a whole bunch of conclusions that who knows if they're supported or not, who knows if I have any contradictions or not, who knows if I've done the work of explaining uh all the sort of secondary implications of whether or not they're true. And here we go. And
you'll notice by the topics I chose here, these tend to be the the playground of the folks with low discernment who just believe any old thing that someone comes up with. And uh this is nothing new historically. Uh This has been a very successful tactic of the adversary to get people with low discernment
loaded up on all of these. Um I guess fringe ideas, I don't want to use the word conspiracy because certainly conspiracies do exist. But fringe ideas that with just a little common sense, they should be able to parse through with a lot more accuracy than they do. So, the problem with these types of people
is uh illustrated in the book of Acts in chapter 16. So soon as it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain damsel possessed with the spirit of divination met us which brought her masters which gain uh which brought her masters much gain by sooth. Saying the same followed Paul and us and cried saying
these men are the servants of the most high God which show unto us the way of salvation. And this did she many days. But Paul being grieved turned and said to the spirit I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her and he came out the same hour. So this uh this lady, she was going around
saying to everyone who would hear that Paul was a servant of God and he was going to show the way of salvation. And yet Paul, this grieved Paul and essentially he told her to shut up, right? So why, why did this happen? Why was he not happy to have someone hyping him? You know, going around saying, hey
, you should listen to this guy. The reason is because who she was, she had a reputation for uh being involved with things that were clearly not, right? And this is the damage that you do. If you're not a discerning person, any truth that you happen to believe inside of your mix of stuff that's not true
is going to be rejected by people who otherwise would listen to it because they're associating it through you with all that other nonsense that their common sense capabilities can clearly filter out. And that's a huge, huge, huge problem in my line of work, I associate with people who have reasonable
rational skills and these people almost completely reject Christianity and anything to do with it as the hokiest thing in the on the planet. And it's really sad for me to see because my approach to this has been quite different than the majority of Christians. And I understand where they're coming from
because I see all those problems too. But my approach to this is sophisticated enough to filter all that nonsense out and what's left is incredibly valuable, but, but it's not accessible to those with without reasoning skills. So the the kid version of Christianity is not gonna fly with these people
. And it's really sad because they would be uh there would be very capable tools in the hands of the Lord to do much good if there weren't so many of these people floating around uh kind of kind of uh following the waters if you will. So um it's not just about the impact to other people though. It also
hurts you because you'll be on a hamster wheel and you'll never get past all these nonsense ideas to really get to the the pay dirt of what will pay dividends in your life and actually get you closer to God and develop your relationship with him. So these are very important things to, to work through
and skills to master it's really important. All right. So we're gonna transition now into the big picture of where this fits into your gospel understanding. So this is a diagram that I find very helpful. And there are a couple of axes here that explain uh where you can be. So you could draw a point anywhere
in 3d space here below this shape that I've drawn. And you're somewhere on this graph. OK. Where we want to be is where the star is and that's where you're going to learn the most about God and become most like he is. But in all likelihood, you're somewhere else on the graph. And this will help you figure
out where you need to improve and change. In order to become to, to get to the point where you can acquire the knowledge, you need to become more like God. So we're going to run through each of these sides of the graph. The first is how constrained you are. Here's that, here's that verse I referred to
earlier. Uh Paul wrote when I was a child, I speak as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things, you're somewhere between the leftmost and rightmost on this. So at the left extreme, you believe reality is defined by what you wish was true
. There are a lot of people like this, OK? For example, if you think no one's actually gonna say this, but if you think in terms such as I wish there were no suffering. So I will act as if that were possible. These types of people, you know, they, they wish they wish that all people were good. And so
they make rules and systems that assume that that's the case and you can predict how that goes. It turns out awfully they wish that there wasn't any suffering and, and then they act as if that was possible and they end up wasting their resources and, and most times they end up making everything worse
for everybody by acting that way. Now, on the opposite side of this, you can be a constrained person and constrained people believe that reality is limited to things as they actually are. In other words, um you can believe you observe things about reality and you notice that among those observations
are some things that you can't change. So you act around them. Um for example, if you understand that humans are inherently evil, but have an enormous positive potential, you will act very differently than if you wish humans were inherently good and, and that is gonna cause that latter case is gonna
cause a lot of problems, right? So in the example that you know that humans are inherently evil, but have an enormous positive potential, you're not going to leave valuables out in a place where they're going to be stolen, but you are going to help teach people that they shouldn't steal things. But if
you sort of just wish that humans were good and you lie to yourself to get yourself to believe that they are. You're gonna have a bunch of stuff stolen out of the back of your truck, right? That's what's gonna happen. Ok. Another axis is the naive discerning axis. That's really important for what we're
, we've talked about so far moon seven, it says, and now my brethren seeing that ye know the light by which ye may judge which light is the light of Christ. See that ye do not judge wrongfully for with that same judgment which ye judge, ye shall also be judged wherefore I beseech of you brethren that
you should search diligently in the light of Christ that you may know good from evil. And if you will lay hold upon every good thing and condemn it not, you certainly will be a child of Christ, a discerning person puts effort into finding out whether something is good or evil. They're rational. They're
evidenced based, they test things and they're like sheep, sheep don't eat any old food, right? They chew things up and they taste them and if they don't like it, they spit it out and they're very selective in what they go after and consume. On the other end of this, we have naive people and they lack
the ability to weigh out pros and cons cost benefit, good evil. They don't think about consistency in their argument. They don't think about observations that they might not be, uh, including, they don't consider their interpretation of their observations. Now, these people almost to a t they're easily
convinced you can convince them of almost anything but they have a low commitment level. They'll skip around from thing to thing. They also tend to have a low sacrifice level where they're just not willing to pay the price. And that's one reason they don't dig in and actually critically analyze things
. And these people are more like pigs. If you've watched a pig eat, it's something else. I mean, they're just like a vacuum cleaner, they'll eat anything and they don't even really chew it, they just kind of absorb it so it disappears and it's gone. So we want to be like sheep and not pigs. Now, um,
on this topic and, and tying this into some things we already talked about with that, that, uh, divining lady that was following Paul around. You will find if you stand up to teach truth in your life. I mean, figuratively, not literally, although you may have the case to, to, to literally stand up somewhere
. Um, if you stand up to teach truth, one of the things that will happen every single time if you're doing this in a public setting is that you will find that when you cast your net by teaching things and you, you pull it in, you will find that most of the fish that you catch are small fish in the sense
that they're these kind of people. Most of the people that will listen to a new message are these naive types of people and that's not a good thing and what you should fully expect when you're doing this. And, and I mean, Jesus knew this very well. He taught about it in a parable where he said, you throw
all the small fish back and you keep the big ones. Um, It's not a good thing because these people are going to turn and rend you again. Remember, don't cast your pearls before swine. And I'm using the, the pig analogy here. It's all intentional. The kinds of people that just gobble stuff up are also
the kinds of people that turn and hurt you later and the way we do this either is they pull in all these crazy beliefs. And now the folks who listen to you are um associated with groups that you probably don't want to be associated with because it minimizes your reach of what you're teaching causes people
to dismiss you out of hand and what you're teaching. Uh or they just tend to be people that are puppets of the devil. And what I mean by that is not that they're necessarily going out and doing, you know, outward satanic ordinances or something, but they will be used by him as puppets to destroy what
you're trying to do and, and mark my words, if you try to stand up and teach the gospel. You will see this, it happens every time. So you want to be on the lookout for this. And once you are educated in this, you can see these people from a mile away and avoid them and minimize their negative um effects
. OK. Now, the open-minded dogmatic spectrum, uh Joseph Smith said Mormonism is truth. In other words, the doctrine of the Latter Day Saints is truth. The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is that we believe that we have a right to embrace all and every item of truth without limitation
or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men or by the dominations of one another when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same. Now, in this quote, I hope that there are people who are watching
this, who are not Mormon or never have been Mormon. Um This quote is really interesting to me because this certainly is not the doctrine of the Latter Day Saints today. So, um you can kind of throw that part out and um interpreted in terms of if you doctrine is truth and if what you seek is truth above
all things, then this should be your attitude that you have a right to embrace all and every item of truth without limitation. It doesn't matter where it comes from. It doesn't matter what previous beliefs, it pulverizes, you have to, to sort it out and integrate it, right? And again, another quote that
isn't so true anymore, but still a really great idea. I stated that the most prominent difference in sentiment between the latter day saints and sectarians was that the latter were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained there
in. Whereas the latter day Saints are ready to believe all true principles that exist as they remain manifest from time to time. I've seen this operate on so many different levels. So just one very simple example is I know someone who there was some gospel discussion going on and a reference to a different
translation of the Bible was brought up and they said, oh no, my church says we're only allowed to read this one translation of the Bible. And I thought, why, why, who said, who said that, that uh that was the only one that was correct or that there was no value in any of the other ones? So someone actually
went through and compared line by line, every single interpretation of every single verse and said this one uniformly is better than all of the others across the board. Where the heck would they get the authority to say something like that and be correct or the knowledge? It's just insane to me. And
that's on a very, very simple level. But this is true across the board. Do you believe what you believe? Because someone told you to believe it or because it fits inside the box that you were given by someone else? Or do you believe it? Because God has manifested the truth of it to you or life has? And
are you open minded to accept something better? If you're open minded, then you have to believe that everything you know, is incorrect or incomplete the degree to which you believe or don't believe that is where you are on the spectrum. You have to believe the truth can be anything and can come from
anywhere. There are no limits on that. If you're at the top end of that spectrum, if you have limits, that pushes you down towards the dogmatic side, you have to believe that truth is infinite and unknowable. This is a really hard one for people to accept because if you accept this, you also have to
believe the first one which is easier to say that you accept than to actually accept. So if you believe truth is infinite and unknowable a noble, it means that anything, absolutely anything you believe could be replaced with something else at some future point in time, this makes people very uncomfortable
and usually it makes them uncomfortable in proportion to how much they've leaned on the the unchanging nature of their beliefs as a source of security in their lives. And so this can make people really uncomfortable really quickly because it reveals to what extent they've trusted in the arm of the flesh
by leaning on things they believe, instead of leaning on God himself and they might have fooled themselves and told themselves that they actually are leaning on God. But really what they're leaning on is what someone has told them about God. And that's very different because God can come to you and say
, hey, this thing you believed about the gospel or about me or about life is actually completely wrong. And here's something else. Instead, this is not figurative in my experience. This is exactly what God did with me and it can rip out your soul. If you lean on what someone has told you about Him. If
you're dogmatic, you believe truth is finite, it's limited, you can put it in a box and that's all there is to know. You believe that everything you already know is all there is to know and these people are everywhere, ok? They're everywhere and you'll see this manifest. For example, when someone loses
their mind, when you say something that contradicts something that they believe. And it's just like kicking a hornet's nest. Those kinds of people think that they already know everything there is to know. Otherwise they say, what do you mean, explain more about this? Why do you believe it? Tell me why
you believe this thing that you believe? So I can compare it to what I've observed um, I left this out of the slides but it just came to me that I should have on those, uh, premising conclusion slides. I should have shown you that explicitly, the premises ought to always be disconnected from conclusions
. What I mean by that is they always ought to be treated differently than conclusions. So, so if you have a conclusion that's different from someone else, the conclusion itself should not be very important to you. What you should be after is understanding their premises because what you want to do is
go down the list and compare your premises and theirs and what you'll find is they will have premises that you haven't considered before sometimes. And so you want to grab those and you want to integrate them into your picture of things and sometimes what you'll find is that their premises are stronger
than yours. And you will have to conclude if you're an honest person that they're actually right in their conclusion and you're wrong in yours. But, uh, many times what you'll find is that that's not the case. And by being aware of these premises that you haven't considered before, your argument actually
gets even stronger. And that's a good thing. But what happens in, in practice is that people cling so tightly to their conclusions, once they get to a conclusion, they throw away their premises, pretend that they never even existed and that they don't matter and they will not shift on their conclusion
, no matter what they're shown what they're told or anything else. There are basically two kinds of people in this life. They are conclusion people and there are premise people and the premise, people are very, very rare. These are the open minded folks and that's what made me think of this. If you're
dogmatic, it means you live in the conclusion world. Maybe you've never even touched the premises. Someone just told you your parents, your pastor, whoever just said this is the way it is your college professor and you were indoctrinated into this line of thought without actually critically analyzing
it yourself or even becoming aware of what the premises were that generated this conclusion and you will never ever shift off of it ever. And, and that's a real travesty. Ok. So where we want to be is where the star is and, um, I think I've shown you how to get there, this kind of person knows how to
test and to sign things as good versus evil. They listen to everything they hear that doesn't mean they believe everything they hear, but they consider everything they hear. They really truly believe that everything they know is incorrect or incomplete. And, uh, they learn reality. That's what they're
concerned with. Not how they wish things were but how they actually are and they concern themselves with describing the things they, they actually observe. They don't live in a fantasy world so that description should imply that this kind of person is rare and that's the case. That's why Jesus said straight
is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life. And few there be that find it, but wide is the gate and broad the way which leads to death. And many there be the travel there in until the night cometh wherein no man can work. Because if you're a normal person, you're not where that star is. You're
somewhere on the edges of this graph where you don't want to be. Um There are actually two kinds of naive people. The first is this open minded, unconstrained person. And um this is the kind of person that shows up to talks when no named people give talks and I'm not saying everyone is like this. So
please don't be offended if there's no reason for you to be in this group. Um I have met some really great people who show up to things like this, but the majority of them are like this. Um They're open minded and unconstrained. So the first half of that is great, it's great to be open minded. But if
you are unconstrained, that is a very dangerous combination. What this is like is a camera that has a really wide aperture but no filter. And so all sorts of nonsense floods into these people and they don't throw it out. Um If you're in this position, what you need to do is learn how to test putative
truth. And I've given you some tools for that. There are many more, but I encourage you to uh seek the Lord and search out resources on how to do this, how to think critically. The second type. And I've uh put a two in the picture there. See where you, you can see where you are are dogmatic and constrained
people. These folks have a narrow aperture and no filter. So uh what is the, the type one people will believe anything you tell them e essentially and they don't challenge it. These kind of people don't challenge it either, but they only accept truth from one specific source or from a small collection
of sources. So these are the kinds of people that believe everything their mom tells them or everything their dad tells them or everything their church tells them or whatever, but they won't believe anything from anywhere else. So the antidote to that uh uh likewise, you need to learn how to test punitive
truth, but you also need to believe it can come from anywhere and believe everything that you think, you know, is either incomplete or incorrect. Uh I've already brought this up, but just as a reminder, Satan will neutralize you, he will actually remove your ability to do the good you otherwise could
have done by keeping you busy with things that are less effective and improving you and others. So just because you're going to church every Sunday, for example, doesn't mean you're doing God's work or that you're doing the greatest good you could do in your life. Maybe the specific church you go to
actually inhibits your ability to do this. So the antidote to this is to find better things than what you currently have. And part of believing the gospel is having the deep belief that there's always something radically better out there that God has for you than what you have. If this were not the case
, you'd already be in his presence with everything he has to give you in conclusion. I I'd invite you to investigate how discerning open minded and constrained you are. And if you detect areas that uh you can improve in, I encourage you to spend the time and effort to do so.