Don’t fear, it’s only day #1 of Evidence Week!

Evidence-based Fear

What do you fear?  Is it based on evidence?  For example, I fear getting shot in the heart by a bullet because the evidence shows that people getting shot in the heart will almost certainly die.  If I am in a situation where that looks like it might happen, you can damn well be sure I will be both afraid and will do everything I can to not let it occur.  However, I do not fear Friday the 13th, black cats, walking under ladders, breaking mirrors or spilling salt.  Why? Because there is no evidence that those things hurt anyone in any more proportion than any other day, color of cat, walking anywhere else, breaking or spilling anything else.  Those who believe they are dangerous are believing a superstition, meaning something that has a tradition, but no evidence, as being a bad thing.

Superstition-based Fear

Yesterday at the church we attend the Pastor asked a woman to come up to the alter and read an email she had sent him a few months prior.  The woman had written it in response to a sermon he had given. In the email she told the story of living a fear-based life. Her fear was directly connected to her overhearing a conversation when she was very young between her father and her pastor.  A man in the church who had voiced his disagreement with the Pastor’s direction for the congregation had been in a terrible automobile accident. He was mortally injured but suffered greatly before he actually died.  The pastor was overheard by the young woman telling her father that it was probably a good thing that he had died, and it was also a good thing he had suffered before his death because it indicated he was being punished for being outside the will of God.  This led the young girl to live her entire life with that fear of God punishing and hurting her or others if she did not obey exactly what the church told her to do and be.  She had written the email to our church’s pastor to let him know how liberating it was to hear him rebut that idea and instead replace it with a vision of God being loving and caring and not out to crush and hurt her or others over theological or any other differences.  

This is a perfect example of the acronym of fear.  She was captive to False Evidence Appearing Real because she listened to an authority whom she trusted and she wasn’t old enough to understand cause and effect, science, biology, and other evidence-based areas of life that argue against that vicious, superstitious and self-serving way of seeing the events in life.

What do you fear?

Is there good evidence that makes the fear valid?

__________________

Drawing by Marty Coleman

Quote by Neale Donald Walsch, American Author of a book series, ‘Conversations with God’.

_________________