Depth

I had an epiphany yesterday while listening to a lecture from my leadership class on Coursera. He was talking about seeing things from other people's point of view and it hit me.

You know how your eyes work? You see one picture with one eye and another with the other eye and your brain puts them together as one and gives us depth. It similar with different people's point of view. Everyone has their own point of view, how they see the world, and it is influenced by the way they were raised, their education, their culture, etc. Each person's view is completely valid and real to them. They each have something to add.

So I have my point of view and if I reach out and validate another persons point of view, my brain combines the two into one picture and I have a depth of understanding in this world. The more people you connect with and reach out to understand, the deeper your understanding goes.

Just like your eyes, even people who live and operate very close to you have a slightly different take on things that, if you connect with them, can change your depth perception of reality.

If more people could come to the realization that everyone has their own story to tell and that everyone has their very own point of view that is completely real, valid, and influences their decisions, there would be a lot more peace in this world.

Thoughts from my Constitution Class Reading

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." - John Milton

And from my text book Chapter 6, "These cases, however, gradually introduced a new perspective on the value of free speech in a democracy, namely, the belief that truth is best reached by the free trade of ideas." (emphasis mine)

Free speech. The First Amendment to the Constitution. I didn't realize how much the idea of what free speech is has changed over the last 200 years. And dramatically over the last 80 years. One of my thoughts as I read the last line quoted above was, "Of course truth is best reached by the free trade of ideas!" I guess it is a matter of how you view government.

If you believe government is created to guide and protect the people, to control and move the people in better directions, then the free trade of ideas would be very bad. People may sway other people to follow them, or change the way they feel about something the government (in its infinite wisdom) is doing.

If you believe government is created to serve the people, then the free trade of ideas is very good. The people themselves need to bat around new ideas to see if they stand up to criticism. They may be better than what we have now and make us stronger. We could try on some new ideas for a while but find them unhelpful and discard them. But it is up to the people themselves.

And as for John Milton's quote, well, I think people generally don't want this anymore. They may want to know truth, but they don't want to work towards it. They want it handed to them by someone else. It doesn't work that way. Truth and enlightenment should be one of our first goals in life, not something we try to get to if we have time after the dishes, the tv show, or baseball game. Is that just me?

Taking a Class on Coursera

I signed up for this a month ago and it started last week, "Introduction to Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases". So far so good!

I finished the first weeks lectures and reading in time for this weeks stuff. That makes me feel good because I wasn't sure I could keep up. We homeschool our kids and so there is a lot of noise all day. I can't really focus on watching a video or writing well when there is much of a distraction. I can do it while video games are being played, but not during TV shows.

Reading is different. I need to do that when everything is quiet and still. I only have about two hours in the morning with that kind of an atmosphere. That would be plenty of time for the reading for this class, but I already read my Bible first, then a few pages of my current part of "The Great Books of Western Civilization". And then my husband is working on remodeling our bathroom in the morning before he goes to his room to work (he works from home), so the boys hear that and wake up a little earlier. They have been very helpful by keeping the TV off until at least 8am for me.

As for the class, I like it. I took a Constitution class through Hillsdale last year and it was not to my liking. It was more about worshiping the Founding Fathers and treated the Constitution as a holy document instead of a legal one. This class is a bit more objective so far.

The first lecture talked about how the Constitution that we have could have been construed as treason since they went to amend the Articles of Confederation and ended up scrapping them all together.

The other thing I never really understood was Originalism vs. Evolutionism regarding the Constitution and judicial activism. That has been fascinating. I have leaned toward keeping true to the original intent of the authors, but hearing the evolutionist side, I can see where they got their ideas. What bothers me about it is that it seems like one of those "slippery slopes" you hear about.