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Today a plane at La Guardia left the runway in snowy weather. No one suffered serious injury, thankfully. But I wanted to bring this up to illustrate how personal perspective and reporting bias can paint very different pictures of the same thing. Here’s a pic from CNN that is followed with the caption “Plane skids off runway… skidding to a halt mere feet from icy waters.”
[attachment=1]delta1.jpg[/attachment] And, sure enough, when you look at that, it looks like the thing was skidding along on its belly and luckily just happened to stop right before the water.
But now look at this picture from another news site:
[attachment=0]delta2.jpg[/attachment] In the above picture it looks a lot more like the plane’s front gear hit the barrier, stopping it’s “skid”.
I bring this up because I think there is a corollary with the Church. We often observe that people perceive us “doubters” in a way that doesn’t represent reality… and the same thing could be said about how people perceive the Church, its people, its history. Two different people could look at the same aircraft, one looking at the top picture and one looking at the bottom picture, and they would come to very different conclusions.
Thanks, OON, good illustration of the point. And may I add it’s nice to see you around of late. Glad to see this wasn’t another “what color is the dress.” I agree. A few weeks ago I about had a 6th sense where some (many) TBM’s can’t even see the other point of view AT ALL. They only see the picture from the back of the plane. The frontal view is just something they wouldn’t even look at.
This is a great example about how we do this all the time in life. Because we tell the story of what happened, the stories are greatly influenced from our vantage point. It seems when we realize there are other vantage points…it can blow our mind how different it looks. Not because we’re doubters or that we lack faith, but simply, because it looks different from a different point of view. And often times a more accurate perspective.
Even so, we are the ones putting the stories in our heads, based on the stories others are telling. And that is important to recognize. A new perspective is still a story.
LookingHard wrote:Glad to see this wasn’t another “what color is the dress.”
The dress came up in F&TM last Sunday. I almost got up to bear my testimony of perspective and point of view, but I resisted.
🙂 I think these pictures and the dress pictures are very much the same – and I agree that many members don’t make that connection that even though they can see these two things differently, they don’t make the church connection.It also is easy to assume that just because we are looking at something from the same place (have the same objective view) we automatically will or should reach the same conclusions. As hard as it is to understand sometimes, that isn’t the case, either. Even from the same basic view, we filter everything through our own individual lens – and our prescriptions all vary and don’t produce the same vision.
My favorite institute teacher was my favorite because he was a convert who brought such a unique and wonderful perspective to the Bible that I hadn’t had the chance to encounter before; he had been devoutly religious in another Christian church and knew the Bible so well that in his younger years, he used to take great joy out of laying in to Mormons and returned missionaries to show them that they don’t know the Bible at all. I remember in one class that he commented that many Mormons, particularly in the corridor, can relate any story to food somehow. I can’t remember his exact phrasing, but it stuck with me as an example of trained perspective — there are perspectives we are comfortable in seeing, but once we start seeing things from the perspective of someone else, our own perspective begins to change. My favorite quote that my art teacher had on her wall has also stuck with me all these years:
Quote:“One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Thanks, DJ. It’s nice to spend a bit of time participating again, although, I think of this as a sabbatical from my hiatus. On Own Now wrote:… although, I think of this as a sabbatical from my hiatus.
:clap: Nice!All this goes right along with Heber13’s end tag: Quote:
Obi-Wan: “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to…depend greatly on our point of view.”
I too, have found this most of my life. I say most because there were times I was intentionally or unintentionally wearing blinders.
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