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Magical Thinking
| Children have a type
of thinking that does not extend too far. They are unaware of where
their food comes from or how their house is paid for. They live in a
world that can seem magical in that somehow whatever they need appears.
In a society with excessive parental indulgence and general prosperity
many can grow into adulthood and still retain a type of thinking that
whatever is desired or needed will somehow appear.
It is not unusual for some teenagers to hear about Jesus and consider
it to be just as real as stories about space aliens or ghosts.
Entertainment with stories about time travel and galactic wars tend to
make credible consideration of all sorts of flights of fancy.
Pragmatic or practical thinking considers consequences, assessments of
risk, and in a broader context, reality. Magical thinking might be
described as the avoidance of reality in favor of pleasure, comfort,
ease, and pleasurable expectations. The exclusion of reality in one’s
thinking can be dangerous.
Perhaps the transgender phenomena can be used to illustrate the problem
with magical thinking. A person can experiment with fanaticizing that
they are of the opposite sex. The pleasure obtained from such thoughts
seems to confirm the idea which then continues to grow and produce even
more pleasure. As a person attempts to manifest these thoughts in real
life, they begin to encounter problems. Eventually reality bursts the
bubble of magical thinking as a person comes to understand the damage
they have done to themselves.
For the Christian difficulty with magical thinking does not need to be
as extreme as transgenderism to be a problem. One can hold a religious
view that provides comfort and even pleasure that falls short of truth
and can result in a lack of rewards, or even missing out on salvation
completely. For example, the person who believes his baptism as an
infant assures him of a place in heaven,might be surprised if this
assumption is not true. Similarly, those who assume that God directs
every event in their life might come to regret not having taken
advantage of things they could have done for others while they were
waiting on God.
Sadly, anything that falls short of truth can be called magical
thinking. Since Jesus is called truth, most Christians think that
whatever their church teaches is truth and that they have an obligation
to resist anything different or even resist any questioning of what
they have been taught. This can result in Christians being mistaken and
unable to recognize it. Rather trusting that what one has been told is
completely accurate, it can be useful to pursue individual inquiry even
questioning one’s own assumptions. The process of inquiry and
questioning also helps one grow and mature.
Magical thinking might be defined as any thinking the rejects truth to
hold to that which satisfies emotional comfort or stimulation. This can
go so far as to declare that to which one holds as “truth”. We can
create an emotional prison where we do not allow ourselves to seek or
even recognize truth. This self-inflicted blindness can lead one to
think others are the ones blind.
And art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness,
An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form
of knowledge and of the truth in the law. - Romans 2:19-20 |
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