First of all, I use my term “age of war” flippantly as humans have been in a state of war for the past 50,000 years, less so today than in most of our history.

Overthinking

The term “Overthinking” is however a realatively new term in our lexicon as depicted in the Google Ngram graph below. This shows the use of the word in published writing over time.

The term “overthinking” has two meanings, one fairly innocent and the other not so much, a vestige of our post-modern culture.

In the first case, overthinking implies that the answer is so obvious, you really don’t need to think about it. For example:

Two friends sitting together.

Betty: I found messages on Rob’s (husband) phone last night between him and a co-worker. It was sexual in content. I’ve been pondering this over night, if I should bring it up to Rob. What do you think?

Nancy: (with a sigh) Don’t overhink this Betty. Hell yeah! Bring it up!

In the second situation, overthinking is often used to mean, “Don’t think at all.” In an age where the dominate thinking fad claims that there is no truth, or if truth exist, we have no way of finding it, then thinking is extraneous. Thinking is a process of shifting through the evidence, using our cognitive abilities to sort it out, with the purpose of finding a truthful conclusion. No, it is not perfect, but is does a remarkably good job of finding truth. If you reverse engineer the human brain, it is designed to think. To reason. To make sense of the evidence around us, which our senses have collected. We do this atuomatically in 99% of our lives, unnoticed. Not thinking isn’t a step up for our species, but a retreat. When a speaker or writer trys to tell you that reason is old school, or inferior to just feeling, it is because they are getting ready to sell you something, an idea or a movement, that has no supporting evidence.

In a State of War

Everytime there is a war, or something else that grabs the headlines, the unthinking conspiracists crawl out from under their rocks. They paint a world of black and white, classical underthinking. Religious and political people are at the worst for this because they have an agenda. By usinga black and white contrast, they generate the emotions that they want. Fear, anger, and hate. It is easier to manipulate people via thier emotional reasoning that rational reasoning.

One of my favorite books is Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In the book, he points out that during the first Gulf War, many evangelical writers and pastors raced to publish their books on how the Gulf War was the fulfillment of some obscure Biblical prophecy about the end times, grosslly underthinking the war. None wrote books about the facts of the war or the ethics of war in general. Those writers knew where the money was.

In this god-awlful (and I use the term literally) war between Hamas and Israel, I’ve already have begun to hear the embellishments and conspiracy theories. I don’t mean embellishments about the heinous acts of the Hamas terrorists . . . something that was so extreme that it cannot subjected to embellishment. But it is the redundant stories to stir the emotions to their most drastic place, while underthinking the whole damn mess. It is the simple bad guys Vs good guys, right? The same thing happens with our own school shootings, a bad guy Vs the good guys. Kill all the bad guys and we will all have eternal peace . . . or would we? As they say, one person’s terrrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.

If anyone reading this is thinking I’m going light on evil, you have totally missed my point. In that case, I must then take the blame for not writing clearly. I am zealous for classical truth (not to be confused with some type of idealogical “truth”). There is no evil in a truthless world . . . neither good. If all opinions are the same, all truth interchangable, then the Hamas leaders who planned this evil, are just as right for saying it was as good, as the rest of us who call it evil.

My point is that in virtually all the cases, humans are not born murderers, they learn to be. To underthink this is to say the bad guys were born bad guys. The only way to deal with them is to murder them . . . all of them. This is the emotion that many people default to. Not trying to understand the history and social order of the present day Palestine/Israel with real solutions. Not trying to understand how Hamas could become so powerful in Gaza. Not trying to understand all the geopolitical influnces in the region. Not understanding how the Islamic religion can be used for evil in the same way that Christianity has often been used for evil, from war and torture to fleecing poor people of their money by TV evangelists. This is not overthinking, but simply thinking.

While the ghastly acts of Hamas upon the relavantly innocent Jewish people must be condemned with the loudest moral voice, I fear of what is instore for the relavantly innocent people of Gaza in the coming days. No, I’m not talking about the planners and supporters of this evil attack who deserve what is coming. I’m talking about the elderly, women, children, or men who had nothing to do with this tragedy. They will die. They, like their Jewish brothers and sisters, will face unimaginable suffering and death in the days to come. If history repeats itself, there will be ten fold the number of Gazans killed and wounded as compared to the Israelis. Many of us will cheer this outcome. Christians especially due to some bizarre idea about the Jewish state. But from this–understandable–pay back by the Israeli army, how many of the next generation of terrorist will be born? Justice is punishment to those who did the evil acts, in proportion to those evil acts. Justice is also setting free those who are innocent. It is a fallacy to think that evil acts can be so severe that the innocent should be punished as well.

A Palestinian Christian asked me once, “Why do American Christians hate us so much? What have we done to them?” To which I replied, “I can explain it to you, but you won’t believe what I say. It is too strange. It all started with a British preacher named Darby.”

Underthinking assigns the status of “bad guys” to whole groups. Gazans. Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims. It is a convenient way to underthink.

I was in the Air Force during the first Gulf war and I remember a group of fellow Air Force officers saying that they wanted to see the US nuke the entire Arab world. If evil is in their blood, why not? Same as killing roaches. Dehumanization is underthinking. “Turn their countries into an empty parking lot,” as one colleague used to say.

But this underthinking is the same mechanism that created this diaster in Israel in the first place. Those who think Palestinians are inferior, full of evil and hate, creating Gaza, the world’s largest prision. Then those on the other side, Hamas specifically thinking all Jews, from the tiniest baby to the most elderly senior are inherently evil, worthy of death. Hamas would have been good bedfellows with Hitler and his dirty pals.

One of about five reasons I wrote the book, The Stones of Yemen, was to drill down into the complex and messy world of terrorism. I wanted the reader to overthink a tragic situation because peace is only born from many nights of overthinking . . . not a emotional fall into the default of hate and retribution. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye, makes the whole world will be blind.” I think a Palestinian-Jew named Jesus said it even better.

Mike