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“empower the people around you to be respectful, but honest. You’ll never discover your blind spots if you’re surrounded by ‘yes’ men or women.” - Phil Cooke
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The Nature and Marks of Spiritual Pride
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Jonathan Edwards: “The spiritually proud man is full of light already; he don’t need instruction, and is ready to despise the offer of it.” - Nick Batzig
“Could it be that we, too, have some serious blind spots? Could it be that we, too, are grossly ignorant in some ways?”
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“did you know that [John] Newton had his initial conversion experience while still engaged in the slave trading business? That he continued to captain a slave ship for more than 5 years while growing in his faith?” - Michael Brown
The Dunning-Kruger effect: Maybe unskilled people know they're unskilled, but nearly everyone believes they're above average.
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“The Dunning and Kruger experiment did find a real effect – most people think they are better than average. But according to my team’s work, that is all Dunning and Kruger showed.” - The Conversation
The Darkest Deception in the Church
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“…we are hypocrites about being hypocrites. We hear the pastor mention the Pharisees during the Sunday sermon, and we smugly draw a bit of a caricature in our minds. The Pharisees are those other Christians we’ve known who ‘just don’t get it.’” - Ref21
The psychology of fairness: Why some Americans don’t believe the election results
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“…the act of discounting the fairness of a decision process when a decision violates one’s identity is not limited to one political party. For example, after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, Democrats tended to believe that his confirmation hearings were unjust, including the withholding of important evidence.
Missing Elements in Our Discussions about Apostasy
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“…we don’t need to think that those who have fallen away knew they were unsaved all along. Rather, we believed they were saved because they believed they were saved and even provided some evidence of it.” - Challies
The List - Discontentment & Self Deception
A pastor friend mentioned some folks who left his church, unhappy because the church used animated Bible stories with their youth. They complained that those videos distorted the Bible and made light of Scripture. The couple finally left the church. But the church they began attending used the same videos, even more frequently than the first.
Why did this couple rant and rave about videos in one church and turn a blind eye to the same videos in another? Because their faultfinding was insincere, trumped up—and not really about the videos themselves. That was merely the pretext.
We are born with a propensity to lie to ourselves and to others. Dostoyevsky wrote, “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” I agree. I witness this in myself, and I see it in others. Our personal pride masks this “lying to self” propensity. Jeremiah 17:9 puts it this way (ESV): “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
