Category: General Rant

Critical Thinking

There are many ways people have tried to define what critical thinking is.

Critical thinking means making reasoned judgments that are logical and well-thought out. It is a way of thinking in which you don’t simply accept all arguments and conclusions you are exposed to but rather have an attitude involving questioning such arguments and conclusions. It requires wanting to see what evidence is involved to support a particular argument or conclusion. People who use critical thinking are the ones who say things such as, ‘How do you know that? Is this conclusion based on evidence or gut feelings?’ and ‘Are there alternative possibilities when given new pieces of information?’
Additionally, critical thinking can be divided into the following three core skills:

  1. Curiosity is the desire to learn more information and seek evidence as well as being open to new ideas.
  2. Skepticism involves having a healthy questioning attitude about new information that you are exposed to and not blindly believing everything everyone tells you.
  3. Finally, humility is the ability to admit that your opinions and ideas are wrong when faced with new convincing evidence that states otherwise.

study.com

Critical thinking is the process of carefully and systematically analyzing problems to find ways to solve them. It involves identifying several possible solutions and then logically evaluating each one, comparing them to one another on their merits, and then selecting the one that you conclude is the most promising.
http://www.thebalancecareers.com by
DAWN ROSENBERG MCKAY

Critical Thinking, the process of thinking carefully about a subject or idea, without allowing feelings or opinions to affect you
dictionary.cambridge.org

I could go on with hundreds of ways to define critical thinking, but I won’t. I believe the simpler less complex descriptions and definitions are usually superior. The definition I like the most is from dictionary.com.

Critical Thinking
disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence
dictionary.com

Watching the events over the past few of weeks tells me that much of our society has lost the skill of critical thinking. Man, human beings, are designed with three important qualities; the ability to make choices, the ability to act and interact with our surroundings, and the ability to feel with emotions. I think of this three part nature of man as, Choice, Action, and Feeling.

Choice and feeling are unseen qualities. It is these two aspects of our nature that determines the actions we take. How these three natures interact determines in large part who we are and how others see us.

As people, we’ve determined that education is important to both the individual and society as a whole. We learn language, history, math, scientific discoveries and various philosophies. All this learning, and more, is designed to help us make choices that benefit each of use.

We train our bodies with exercises, sports, motor skills and more to allow us to do the things that need doing. In other words to perform actions.

We also train our emotions. Socializing, charity, liking, lusting, anger, and joy all involve our feelings. Growing up, we learn how to rationally manage our feelings.

We need all three natures of ourselves to be a whole person. We also need to keep them in balance. Choices made without feelings or the ability to put them into action won’t amount to positive results.

Critical thinking helps join all three aspects of ourselves to help make whatever we do successful. If we make choices for our actions without considering feelings, we act in a cold and calculating manner. If we acted on feelings alone without being guided by well thought out choices, we do dangerous things, to us and others. By nature we can act without thought or emotions; when we touch a hot iron, we act automatically to pull away. We train ourselves to do things without having to think or use emotions. We teach ourselves physical skills like walking or riding a bike.

When we act on our emotions or make choices that are not well thought out, we often do regrettable things. Both the cause of the current rioting and the rioting itself are the results of the lack of critical thinking. Yes, there is historical and ongoing actions that need changing and there are influencers and groups of people that are inciting violence and destruction of property for their own unrelated agendas.

If we all learned and practiced critical thinking, much could be accomplished for the good of all.

The End of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave?

The United States of America, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, experiments in freedom the world has known has fallen victim to a disease that is plaguing most of the nations of the world. Before I talk about that, let’s review what it is that has made America the “land of the free and home of the brave.”

The Constitution of the United States is likely the greatest secular document ever written to be a guide and law for defining a nation. Our founders didn’t write this document to tell the people what rights they had as a people, but rather what rights the people voluntarily allow those they select to lead them. After defining the basis in which ordinary citizens will serve in the government, it goes on to limit the rights of that government by calling out a few of those natural rights the government is not permitted to infringe.

Slowly over the past 200 plus years, we’ve given up some of our freedom and rights, either thinking we were fulfilling the greater good or because the courts thought they knew better than the founders. Now, suddenly amid a great reawakening and emerging prosperity brought on by a President who believes in the innovative ability of Americans to make their own choices and to increase their lot in society through free and brave incentives, we find ourselves less free and less brave than our ancestors were when they decided to break away from tyranny and despotic rulers and form this nation.

To think a people who celebrate our forefathers for rebelling against British rule and sacrificed their lives for their children, families, and neighbors are now fearful of an illness, a pandemic to be fair, that might cause 0.03% of our people to die? Because of that fear, we are somehow willing to give up our lives to poverty and the side effects of poverty that we haven’t seen in a century. When we last saw this type of economic devastation, it didn’t happen voluntarily. This time we are going into it with our eyes wide open, listening to the fearful cries of those who would have us become wards of the government, shredding society of all that our forefathers fought and died for. Shame on us!

It is acceptable for a people under siege of an enemy to temporarily agree to give up some of their freedoms to join in a fight to defeat this common enemy. It is not acceptable for our leaders (President, Governors, and Mayors), to go beyond the minimal measures to accomplish the goal of victory. After a victory is won, even at the turn of the battle in our favor, our leaders need to step back and return the rights and freedom they temporarily asked the people to lend them. For those leaders who take advantage of the goodness of their people during this emergency, they need to be thrown out of office, not at the next election cycle, but as soon as the people and courts can accomplish that. If they are unwilling to step down, then impeachment would be the answer. What higher crime and misdemeanor can there be than a violation of the very rights and freedoms that define our society. Let us return to being the land of the free and home of the brave.