Are you seeing what is or what you expect to see or want to see?

In the late 1980s I made one of the most important decisions in my life. I created what we now call the BHC Primary Guideline and committed to following it, no matter where it took me.

My Belief System will be

Large Enough to include all Facts,

Open Enough to be Examined and Questioned, and

Flexible Enough to Change if Errors or New Facts are discovered.

Every Exploring Our Biblical Heritages Educational Email is written to help you use the BHC Primary Guideline to examine your own Belief System. It was around 2015 that I learned that the Realities through which humans experience life – everything we sensory perceive and imagine is generated by the brain through a biological process – and that is FACT. The brain creates Belief Models and uses them to generate Realities.

The BHC Primary Guideline was created to deal with Religious Belief Systems, but today we know that humans do not have neatly compartmentalized and separated belief systems – religious, political, economic, etc. All Belief Models exist within a brain’s neural networks. Therefore, by learning how to explore Religious Belief Systems as part of our Biblical Heritages, you are also learning how to explore all Belief Systems.

In the 1980s when I created this guideline, no one in their wildest dreams would have been able to imagine the world we live in today -- Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Smartphones, Amazon, Zoom, Bitcoin, Driverless Cars, NFTs, etc. In our world, we have fewer face-to-face life experiences with others and more face-to-devices life experiences.

Human brains have shifted from generating deviceless Realities to Realities in which devices provide most of the information the brain uses to create Belief Models and generate Realities. The lines between the two types of Realities are blurring. People are confusing things they imaged (subjective individual realities) with objective realities of the physical world.

The BHC Primary Guideline can be used as a GPS for the Brain by distinguishing between fact-based beliefs and other types of beliefs. I will now share related information from Adam Grant’s new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (pp. 16, 24-25, 29). I highlighted key points for emphasis purposes.

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Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.

Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test,

the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes,

because you’re faster at recognizing patterns.

And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.

One study investigated whether being a math whiz makes you better at analyzing data. The answer is yes — if you’re told the data are about something bland, like a treatment for skin rashes. But what if the exact same data are labeled as focusing on an ideological issue that activates strong emotions — like gun laws in the United States?

● Being a “rocket scientist” makes you more accurate in interpreting the results — as long as the results support your beliefs.

● If the empirical pattern clashes with your ideology, math prowess is no longer an asset; it actually becomes a liability.

The better you are at crunching numbers, the more

spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views.

● Liberal math geniuses did worse than their peers at evaluating evidence that gun bans failed.

● Conservative math geniuses did worse than their peers at assessing evidence that gun bans worked.

In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern:

Confirmation Bias:

Seeing what we expect to see.

Desirability Bias:

Seeing what we want to see.

These biases don’t just prevent us from applying our intelligence -- they can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth. My favorite bias is the “I’m not biased” bias, in which people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap.

The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations.

Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking.

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The quotes on the graphic above are from Steve Jobs of Apple and Mike Lazaridis of the BlackBerry phone. They reflect the power of the above biases. But when it comes to beliefs about God and Jesus, the power of those biases are multiplied exponentially. So, keep the BHC Primary Guideline handy. Chances are very high that some of your trusted belief will be challenged, too. One of the most asked questions among Biblical Heritage Explorers is this: