Holy Week?

As Easter morning, the most holy time for the Christian church approaches, it strikes me as ironic that the U.S., arguably the most Christian nation on earth with a Christian president elected by Christians, dropped somewhere between $60 million and $400 million of bombs and missiles on two different countries this week (depending on whose numbers you use).

According to cost estimates from Feed the Children, it costs about $1.00/day to feed a child in Africa. That means the money the U.S. military spent bombing Afghanistan and Syria this Holy Week could have fed between 164,000 and 1.1 million African children for a year.

On this Easter, I have to ask Christians, “What do you think Jesus would have done?”

#WhoWouldJesusBomb  #LoveYourNeighbor

What If I’m Wrong?

If I believe that my particular perspective or solution for any given political, religious or social issue is the only right view, it creates a problem.  It means that everyone else in the world who thinks differently is wrong.  That seems both arrogant and dangerous.

Katheryn Schulz has an insightful TED talk on the subject.

Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you’ve got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they’re ignorant.

If we would all ask ourselves, “Is there some possibility that I’m wrong?” before we respond to others, the world would be a better place.