Day 4 = Eye opening

My blog will shift its focus from time to time from being a journal of my daily activities to focusing on individual insights I have received on my trip. Today was a huge eye opener for me. If I had to leave the academy early I could still say it was worth all the work it took to get here, because what I learned today.

Dr. Guiliano made the statement that “we have a moral mandate to spread the truth.” Another word for mandate is command; we are commanded to spread the truth. He also said we are mandated to be as effective as possible in spreading the truth. For some time I believed this meant I should be prepared to win any argument I was faced with. If I was able to obliterate the opposition with my words, that was a victory. This is exactly what I have done in some recent online debates. I was so proud of the zingers I threw at my opposition. The reality is that even though I may have won the argument I accomplished nothing more than solidifying the opposition’s position against me. I hadn’t changed hearts. I need to be persuasive and not only right. He recommended a book called Civility by Stephen Carter. This book asks the question of why do people show poorer manners today than in previous ages? How did we come to confuse rudeness with self-expression and acting on our "rights"? One answer to this is found in the analogy of driving a car. In cars people don’t have to be civil, in fact they will sometimes honk their horn or flip off a person for an offense they would never thought twice about had the incident occurred during walking. Heck, sometimes we even pass gas in our cars. We are basically a rude people while driving our cars. Carter argues that we are a society that is living life in cars. This predisposition we have tends to make us less civil in debates, which is counter productive to our desired results, winning hearts and minds to the truth. He advises that it is possible to passionately argue for truth and leave your audience feeling respected and taken seriously. A person shouldn’t feel like they have lost by agreeing with you. This is such a paradigm shift from my previous way of thinking. It has caused me to ask the question … do I want to be a Rush Limbaugh or a Ronald Reagan?

I will close out my blog with a couple of pics.