right to peaceably assemble?

A "Berean attitude" or Berean thinking is a Christian term but it can be adopted by anyone. It is simply the mindset of not accepting anything without searching for the truth of it. In other words prove it to me.

I think most so called conspiracy theorists are actually Berean thinkers in nature.

"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. " Acts 17:11 (NIV)

You say that 12 arabs flew 2 planes into the WTC so we have to go to war. Ok let's prove that. The Germans were told that they had to go to war because terrorists blew up the Riechstag. Americans were told that we had to go to war because Vietnamese ships attacked us in the Gulf of Tonkin. We would have been told that we had to go to war in the Middle East because Egyptians had sunk the USS Liberty. But it didn't sink.
So prove it.

You say that we have to authorize our police to control rioters who are breaking windows and causing choas. But we learn that the police have actualy been caught, in numerous instances, planting agitaters to give them cause to disrupt protests.
So prove it.

You say that we have to give our government unlimited powers to spy on us because that is the only way to keep us safe. But we learn that governments throughout time, including our own, have used fear of an unseen enemy to coerce thier populace into accepting restrictions and intrusions that they wouldn't otherwise accept.
So prove it.


A great many people think they
are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
William James (1842-1910)



Too many people just readily accept what they are told or what they think they see as fact and never question it. Or if told something that does not fit into thier world views or thier particular prejudices, angrily, and sometimes violently, attack the ideas or worse the people who brought those ideas up.

"Great thinkers will always be violently opposed by mediocre minds" - Albert Einstien

"What is your response when someone brings a teaching with which you may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable? Are you the type of person who immediately stops up your ears and refuses to even dialogue with this person? Do you go into attack mode and vilify him/her before others?"

To a thug, dialogue is unthinkable; to a thinker, it is imperative. or to paraphrase;

To a sheep, questioning is unthinkable; to a Berean thinker, it is imperative.

In this age we need to be more like the Bereans and less like the Thessolonicans.

 

Berean = "Show me." We may soon hear from Monkeyman, methinks. Me also thinks that direct evidence (such as home videos of street idiocy) carries far more weight than deductive reasoning founded on outlying data points. Einstein was right --.

And I close my mind too, now and then. Especially when "stuff" is repeated ad nauseam without direct evidence.