Telling Stories

I always cringe when I hear someone call Christians (or any religious people) dumb. I get it. There’s definitely a ton of ignorance with a Cross Logo on it, as it were. The energy behind calling people dumb tends to be something along the lines of They believe a fairy tale. How stupid. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not very honest about ourselves. Everyone puts trust into things we don’t understand, because we have to. We trust what the experts tell us . . . sometimes they’re experts, and sometimes they’re “experts,” but they all somehow convince us they know more than we do about a particular topic.

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Here’s the best way I can illustrate my understanding of what happens inside our brains: flipbooks.

I’ve always loved flip books. A few doodles in the corner of a book turn into a motion picture . . . a story, with the steady flip of a thumb. What exists before us is an array of similar drawings. What we see is a person or object in motion through the course of a story. That’s how our brains work. Our brains connect the dots and fill in the blanks. We believe things that turn out to be fairy tales, because our brains store information as much in story form as it does in indexed files of data.

We aren’t computers. When we don’t know something, we don’t just return an error code. If we lose vision in one eye, we don’t picture a giant black spot in our mind’s eye, we imagine what we think could be there based on what we have cached in our brain.

I believe that’s why we get so upset when we find out we’ve been lied to. We base our entire worldview from perception to dogma on the stories we’ve been told and what we tell ourselves. We do this to fill the universe-size holes in our knowledge of what is real and true. When someone, intentionally or unwittingly, sells us on an inaccurate story and misdirects our storytelling imaginations, we feel stupid.

One of the best things about movies and stories like The Matrix, The Truman Show, Free Guy, or Jury Duty in which people find themselves absorbed into a fabricated world under the delusion that it’s real is the shock and panic that overcomes them when they realize they’re being deceived about everything. They feel stupid, empty, manipulated, and alone.

But they’re not stupid, and they’re not alone. For some reason, we tend to evaluate people based on the relative quality of the stories they believe. It’s one way to do it, sure. But I think our tendency is based partly on our own experience (what stories have I learned—and therefore expect others to have learned—are untrue) and partly on the story we haven’t shaken from Christianity (good people believe the truth and bad people believe lies).

I think maybe it’s time to rethink that story.