Biases at Work Within All of Us
Brian McLaren has identified sixteen biases that prevent us from seeing things in their complexity and with greater clarity:
People can’t see what they can’t see. Their biases get in the way, surrounding them like a high wall, trapping them in ignorance, deception, and illusion. No amount of reasoning and argument will get through to them, unless we first learn how to break down the walls of bias. So what are the specific kinds of bias we need to address, in others, yes, but also in ourselves?…
Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit.
Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.
Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t, can’t, or won’t see.
Complementarity Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I’ll be hostile to yours. If you are curious and respectful toward my ideas, I am more likely to respond in kind.
Competency Bias: We don’t know how much (or little) we know because we don’t know how much (or little) others know. In other words, incompetent people assume that most other people are about as incompetent as they are. As a result, they underestimate their own incompetence and consider themselves at least of average competence.
Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can’t be seen from where I am right now. But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.
Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.
Conservative/Liberal Bias: I lean toward nurturing fairness and kindness, or towards strictly enforcing purity, loyalty, liberty, and authority, as an expression of my political identity.
Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth.
Catastrophe Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don’t notice gradual decline (or improvement).
Contact Bias: When I don’t have intense and sustained personal contact with “the other,” my prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged.
Cash Bias: It’s hard for me to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it.
Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, exonerate us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators.
Constancy/Baseline Bias: Early in life, our brains set a baseline of normalcy based on what we constantly experience day to day. What our brains determine as normal or constant becomes acceptable to us. Later in our life, our baselines may be reset when a new normal becomes our constant experience. [This is the flipside of Catastrophe Bias.]
Certainty/Closure Bias: Our brains find it difficult to rest when we feel uncertainty, so we would often rather reach for premature closure on an unwarranted certainty than live with appropriate uncertainty. We may even prefer a pessimistic certainty to a potentially optimistic uncertainty.
Cleverness Bias: Our brains are vigilant to protect us against deceptions, and this vigilance against deception can make us so habitually skeptical that we become cynical, rejecting all good or encouraging information as naïve. In protecting ourselves from danger, we can unintentionally insulate ourselves from positive possibilities.
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Welcome to Bradley Jersak’s Substack! In the parable of the prodigal son(s), I love the verse, “And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” That’s my story. I hope that in the posts to follow, you’ll see it shine through.
Living Under the Gaze of God – Bradley Jersak
Riffing off Tony Bartlett
Last week, my friend Tony Bartlett posted a note on his socials that helped me reflect on developments in my spiritual journey. He spoke of ‘three modes of God,’ language some folks stumbled over (no, he’s not a ‘Modalist’). But his explanation was clear. Tony was describing stages or cycles of our understanding and experience.
1. Looking AT God – referring to our various notions or ideas about God. Not God ‘as such’ but the projections create, often in our own image, and frequently toxic.
2. Looking FOR God – referring to our quest for God, rooted in authentic longing, expressed as faith practices, which may even serve to deconstruct unhelpful constructs that we ought to leave behind.
3. The Gaze OF God – Tony says it beautifully: “The gaze OF God is so gentle you hardly notice it, and then, when you do, it seems to be there only a certain moment in the past. But then you come to understand this gentle gaze is constant and is here in the present, even when you don’t directly know it. The “I AM I AM” of Exodus and Isaiah.”
We can use this outline to trace growth in our lives, reflecting on each in turn with a series of simple questions:
LOOKING AT GOD QUESTIONS
Looking AT God – Hopefully, we come to realize our ideas of God and our language for God will always be inadequate. Knowing that, we still draw inferences and develop images from our experience (or not) of the Divine. That’s normal and even fine so long as we don’t delude ourselves into confusing communion with God (fully available) with getting our heads around the Infinite (no way). God will always be greater than our minds can grasp.
Questions: How has your perception of God changed over the last decade? Since childhood? Fill in the blank: “Over time, I have come to see God as less _______ and more ________.” Do those shifts feel like growth? Or have regressed? Do you experience greater nearness? Or have you grown more distant? Does the relationship feel more or less intimate? More or less personal? Can you trace reasons for the difference? Was it natural growth? Or deep questioning? Or traumatic experiences? Was there a particular community, mentor, or author who helped? How did they effect change in how you Look AT God.
LOOKING FOR GOD QUESTIONS
Looking FOR God – If we think about our quest FOR God in terms of faith practices, we can also ask how those have changed along with our image of God. Let’s not be too judgy about our faith practices. Simply observe how they have shifted over time.
Questions: How has your spirituality changed over the last decade? Since childhood? Do you pray or meditate? How has that developed? What does worship look like for you? Where do you sense a Living Connection with God and with others most naturally?
When I asked my friend Paul Young about his faith practices, he began recounted the ways he once looked FOR God through prayer and meditation—practices that were a means to communion. But like Tony’s quote above, he came to experience union and communion with God almost continually. He didn’t need a program to get and stay there (Jesus called this ‘abiding in the Vine’).
But then I began to observe a wide array of ‘ways of being’ he practices all the time: remaining present, attentive listening, deep conversations, visiting friends on death row, praying in the Spirit, and of course, his famous hugs.
How about you? What faith practices come most naturally to you? How do they serve your quest FOR God? Have some hindered your sense of presence? Why?
THE GAZE OF GOD QUESTIONS
The Gaze OF God – Sometimes we become so attached to the quest FORGod that our practices become the point. God becomes the proverbial carrot dangling on the end of the stick—always just out of reach, demanding more religious activity, more passion, more zeal, but never delivering. The apostle Peter called this ‘clouds without rain.’
At some point, our souls need do come to rest under his tender gaze. This is ‘the God who sees me’ of Hagar. Like the Psalmist, who was like “a deer panting after water, a soul thirsty for God,” but later was able to sing:
Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty:
neither do I exercise myself in great matters,
or in things too high for me.Surely I have behaved and quieted myself,
as a child that is weaned of his mother:
my soul is even as a weaned child.(Psalm 131)
God invites us “Be still and know that I am God.” I doubt this is linear. We go through seasons and cycles and spiral, so it’s a question of where I am on the pilgrimage.
Questions: Do you ever get the sense of living under God’s caring gaze? Have you discovered the grace of the divine glance? Are you able to cease striving and yet know you’re loved? Do you find getting there difficult or immediate? What seems to help? When is your heart most at rest?
I hope these reflections work to remind you of God’s love for you, of God’s participation in your journey, and serve as an invitation to gratitude…
God sees you, and that’s good news.
