Editor's Section




Our Method

There are three main parts to our method:

One of our concerns on this website is to bring about an awareness of our thinking tools. If we were asked whether we thought with tools from Aristotelian bivalency, or Cartesian geometry, linearly or non-linearly, mechanically or biologically, macro, micro or mid-range, or if our perceptual toolkit included woofers and tweeters we would probably think the person demanding this of us had just got off the boat from Mars!

But when you think about it, most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about what we think with. We just get on with thinking - when we actually think. For most of us learned how to think in the first few years of our lives as our minds developed within our particular culture, or combination of cultures along with external and more recent influences such as electronic media - audio or audio visual.

We have some appreciation of Richard Dawkins' term cultural meme (even though he has latterly exposed himself as a mediocre theologian and religious fanatic). This is what the developing brain of a child interacts with as its mind emerges. On the small scale there are as many individual cultural memes as there are people but within each culture there will be a great similarity among its members. Where there is no established cultural meme we might see the tragic malformation of personality. This can occur when there is forced and traumatic migration of entire peoples, as in slavery or ethnic cleansing, or where children are abandoned and left to grow up on the street. We will be looking at this in future articles.

For our present purposes we are concerned with the thinking tools of Christians. In preparation for succeeding articles it might be a useful exercise for readers to compare their cultural meme with others. One technique we recommend is thought experiments. Mental 'what if?' exercises. Suggestions for thought experiments will be sprinkled throughout the website and later on we will establish a page especially for these. If we receive feedback in the form of results of thought experiments we will publish these also.

If we were asked to classify ourselves as to the type of Christians we are, we would be inclined to say we are biblicists. This does not identify us solidly with any specific organized group but rather with a virtual fellowship of Christians who struggle to think and act biblically in the face of our present world.

Much of Christian thought has been shaped by Greek thinking tools, starting with the aforementioned Aristotelian bivalency. Readers are encouraged to do an internet search for articles on Dionysius the Areopagite, pseudo-Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas. Dig deep and learn how apparently Christian theology is interwoven with Greek philosophy. Then do the self-examination bit and see how your own thinking works.

We will attempt to upgrade our thinking processes by reference to the perceptual tools developed in the last third of the 20th Century in the world of science. We believe that these perceptual tools can bring some radical and needed changes to theology, sociology and theory of language.

Once we catch on to being aware of what we think with as we do our thinking, we can expect to zero-base most subjects we approach. When we understand systems and how systems bifurcate when new information is infused into them we will see that the real intellectual interest is not in the system after it has bifurcated but in the infusion of new information, the form of the information and the method of its infusion.

To put these thoughts into a usable concluding aphorism/sound byte: Christians are not on this planet to get people into church; they are here to change the world.

Our thinking is one key to that purpose.