Very soon the election which our nation completes on Tuesday, November 3, will be history. Votes will have been cast and counted, and eventually, a winner will be declared.
I don’t remember an election ever having been so rancorous as this one. Name-calling, slander, lying, and a host of other ills have characterized our public debate and embarrassed us on an international scale.
One of the things I have noticed has been the widespread use of very bad reasoning or logic used. 1) The first was that “my vote doesn’t count so I’m not going to vote this year.” When you look at the numbers after an election is in the books it is stunning to see how many elections hinged on paper thing margins.
Jon Hustad, Secretary of State of Ohio, wrote that 141 Ohio elections between 2013 and 2017 resulted in a tie or a ONE-VOTE difference.
In 2016 the gap between members of Great Britain who wanted to leave Europe (Brexit) and those who wanted to stay in Europe was less than 4 percent. Britain left Europe amid great turmoil.
Thousands of other examples might be given, Suffice it to say that one vote is all it takes to win or lose. But you will never know that until after the election is over. So voting is an act of faith. By not voting, you may contribute to the loss of the candidate that you preferred.
Not voting is an act of indifference or cowardice. It is certainly not the act of a person with passion and concern.
2) The second case of bad logic was the comment by a fellow Christian that a person she was dialoguing with was guilty of violating Jesus’ statement that the one without sin should be the first to throw a stone at an offending individual. (This, of course, was Jesus’ statement to the men who had just dragged a woman out of the arms of her paramour.)
This judgment of whether the poor woman should live or die is far different than that of the act of condemning the daily, continual actions of a person in authority against those weaker or with less power than he. Jesus was the one who said that “by their fruit you will know them,” Matthew 7:20. To call lying by its name, to identify wrongdoing on the part of any public official is doing nothing more than fruit inspection.
3) The third case of illogic is the statement by government officials that testing increases cases of Covid. This is to say that testing precedes infection, making testing alchemy. Which means that if we’d just ignore the idea of Covid 19, there would be no Covid 19.
Testing as a cause of Covid disavows the existence of viruses. Ignores the fact that Covid can be passed from one person to the next. We all took a science class and know the falsehood embedded in that belief.