Presently, the results of the recent Midterm elections are dominating the news cycle -- shining a spotlight on the polarized state of our Nation. Don’t worry, you’ll forget all about these midterms soon enough.
You know there are other stories circulating as well, even though politics usually roars the loudest. While we are being distracted by arguments over the economy, immigration, and the future of healthcare, one subject keeps slipping under the radar. There is a subtle yet insidious small stream of information trickling throughout the media: Your memory, or more to the point, your undependable memory.
Sly efforts to undermine the confidence in our memory are slowly chipping away our confidence in our ability to recall the truth. If you haven’t heard the reports of how poorly we remember the facts yet, a simple internet search will surely leave you discouraged. Study after study reports how “notoriously unreliable” our memory is. Experts claim we generate details which are outright false, but “feel” correct.
Reach back in time and try to remember a period of time when our minds weren’t celebrated and considered trustworthy. I’d say from the 1700’s to the early 1990’s, the human mind was considered the most powerful and capable entity in the universe. Sure, the age of enlightenment had its faults, but the capacity for the mind was unquestioned. No longer is this the case in our “postmodern” milieu.
The recent Kavanaugh hearings are just one example of how “unreliable” our memory is. People on both sides of the “aisle” used faulty mental facilities to their advantage, after all these events were 35 years ago..., so the actual events would be fuzzy and hard to remember. Then, there are news reports and studies constantly being released detailing how we misremember our childhoods. Consider how parents and children remember tragic events differently in a family crisis. Therefore, the experts insist, we can’t trust our fickle minds to much of a degree of accuracy.
With the radical rise of relativism in the past few decades (that being the idea that there is no such things as absolute truth and what’s true for you isn’t true for me) the latest fatality to a Biblical Worldview is our mind. I’m guessing if you noticed this, you might not have stopped to ask what is the motivation to discredit our mental recall and the ability to trust our memory. There are similar attacks on the veracity of recorded history too. These biased perspectives have an agenda, not to uncover Truth, but to create disequilibrium, doubt, and disillusionment.
I’m of the opinion that certain people will seek to convince us we can’t trust our memory or history for the sole purpose of destroying the integrity of the Bible, and especially the reliability of the Gospel accounts. As you may recall, the Gospels weren’t written within months of the ministry of Jesus, but were recorded in written form decades afterwards.
I predict the onslaught attacking our memory and its reliability will increase rapidly over time. More and more people will become convinced that their memories are unreliable, and over time, this will erode their trust in the Scriptures. Is there an legitimacy to this attack?
Since you’ve misplaced your keys and forgotten important appointments, you might be wondering if our memories are as bad as the experts say. But then again, you’ll be hard pressed to find any contemporary who was aware of JFK's assassination that day who can’t tell you where they were when they heard the news. Same thing for those who remember 9/11. Just like the way you remember your wedding day or the last moments spent with a loved one on the day they passed, certain moments are etched on our minds with precision. Sure, you don’t remember what you ate last Saturday, but you’ll never forget the time you had food poisoning while you were on vacation.
Again, my opinion is there is a concerted effort to undermine the confidence in our memory ultimately with the goal to discredit the Bible. Not only do I believe are our minds more reliable than the experts claim, there’s the overlooked fact that the Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit. Yes, human hands wrote down the sacred text, but as fallible as the individuals might have been, they were guided by God. This, along with the massive amounts of internal consistency throughout the Bible, gives me great confidence in the trustworthiness of the Bible.
