When you analyze things in life you have to be very careful not to allow your world view to stack the data in your favor. This is extremely difficult to do. People (humans) have a natural tendency to want things to go their way. I know I struggle with this constantly. People just want to be right within their own world.
Global Climate Change Scientists were discovered to be doing this very thing in 2009. A fudge factor in code, is a way of stacking the data in order to help influence results to turn out the way you think they should.
One needs to be extremely careful as well to not believe they’ve seen all the data. I believe most of us (at least those of any years of maturity) have heard someone say:
“At my age I’ve seen it all.”
I always want to say “Really? Because God is INFINITE. In ALL directions. Which means he is infinitely big and infinitely small. Infinitely loud and infinitely quite. Infinitely colorful and infinitely monochrome. God is more than we can possibly imagine, more than we can fathom, more than we can ever possibly know. And you have seen it all? I think not.” We can spend an infinite amount of lifetimes and never fathom the depths of an infinite God.
King Solomon put it this way in Ecclesiastes 8:16 – 17 pointing out that a wise man may think he knows the works of God, only to find out that he does not.
Jesus Christ himself said that we must be humble like children in Matthew 18:2-4. I believe he made this particular comparison because children are mostly full of wonderment. They are growing, exploring, learning, discovering, depending, needing, wanting, and trusting. As we get older we become wise and our wisdom leads us to be less dependent, less needy, wanting more than we need, less trusting, and growing less, exploring less, learning less, and discovering less. We are no longer dependent upon God, but rather upon ourselves and we give God a call whenever we think we need him (which is never because we are certainly wise enough to figure our own way out of situations).
Do not ever think you have seen it all, because God has more than your lifetime can fill that he wants to show you.
And thus, having not seen it all, be careful as to how you try and stack the data from what you have seen and do know.
We all have to make choices in life. And we are all responsible for those decisions and there are consequences to what we do. But we do have a choice in how we analyze the data.
When you leave God out of the picture, you stack the data to influence your particular world view. When you become humble, like a child, you begin to realize and understand the incredible gifts of knowledge that God has blessed you with. You want to know him more, you want to explore, you realize how little you have and you want more.
Funny thing about data analysis, I may generally interpret the data to support any particular view I have. I believe Weather Scientists the world over are doing just that today. They couldn’t possibly interpret the data in an unbiased way at this point because they have stacked the data so heavily in their favor, they have tainted the data pool beyond the point of recovery.
There is one area though where the data will always be sound and firm. There is one area where you cannot stack the data, where the data cannot be falsely interpreted, and where conclusions will always be validated.
And that area of study is with God. There is a catch though, God may only be accepted on Faith and not by Sight. Yes, that is disconcerting to some. Some are screaming right now that Faith is not Science. And yet Science exercises faith each and every day.
When we seek after God, with all our heart, and with all our strength, and with all our mind, and with all our soul, he will reveal himself to us. Because he is God. God actually wants us to discover him, to explore him, to know him. And thus he will ensure that any who truly seek after him as a child in wonderment, they will find him.
Those that say there is no God and that they have never found God or evidence of God, have simply stacked the data. They have never truly sought after God to begin with. They have been loading up all their data and applying their fudge factors to the data to get it to say what they want it to say.
I’d like to encourage us all (myself included) to start exploring the riches of God today as if we know absolutely nothing about him. It would be great if we all became little children and all gazed at the world in wonderment once again. It would be great if we all stopped believing in how wise we are, and how experienced we are, and how much data we’ve amassed over our lifetimes.
If we simply stopped stacking the data in our lives, let go of our biases driven by our world views, and began exploring things without an agenda, who knows the types of changes we could really see effected in the world around us?
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