Another example to help analysis/clear thinking

What can you tell about the type of book a person owns? Here is another quick lesson in faith and reason and ability to think through a problem or question accurately. The answer to this question is not as easy and obvious as it seems. Again, I present this example in good faith open dialogue, not as hidden message/anagram or words that perverts who have porn, for example, can derive comfort from. The reason I am raising this as our next intellectual and reasoning skills question is that the shooter in the UU church had certain conservative books that made the headlines as people looked for reasons as to why he committed his horrible acts. I realized right away this is a great case study topic in general, and from this point on I am no longer referring to the UU church shooter and his books. I just got the idea for this topic from that subject. OK? OK.

Let’s start by understanding that there is never an obvious reason why someone has a book because by definition there are two equally plausible totally opposite scenarios. One is that a person owns a book because they want to learn about the topic and they know nothing about it. The opposite equally plausible explanation is that the person is an expert in that subject and collects books on that subject.

Think about it. Use even the example of the Bible. A person visits another person’s home and notices a Bible. They immediately jump to a conclusion based on their own narrow mindedness and prejudices. They assume the person is a “Bible thumper.” But what if the person grew up with no religion at all, and in some forum, such as an AA meeting, decided to get one and see what it is all about, in case it helps them with recovery? So there are two equally plausible opposite end of the spectrum reasons about why someone might have a Bible. And if those are the two ends of the spectrum (expert on book subject and wants more vs. knows nothing about the subject and may be having first look which may or may not develop into liking it at all), obviously logical indicates there are a multitude of reasons in between. What if the person is a rare book collector, but not a believer? What if the person is a believer and does collect various editions? What if one denomination is checking out the Bible of another denomination? What if it is just a sentimental family artifact, inherited from the grandparents, for example. What if it doesn’t belong to the person but was left there by someone else? What if the child in the family is going through religious instructions but the parents are not? What if someone is taking a literature course and the Bible is being studied as originator of much of Western literature during certain eras? What if the person is an artist and wanted the art work in the Bible for aesthetic reasons? What if the person is an editor, scholar or book reviewer, and planning to do a review of that Bible edition? What if it was a gift and an opinion has not yet been formed? What if it is going to be a gift to someone, or a donation? What if the person had it because they stole it from a hotel because they are anti-Christian, and they had not yet disposed of it yet? What if the person had bought a garage sale grab bag and the Bible was in it? What if, what if, what if? How do you ever know the answer?

Well, duh, jumping to an unspoken conclusion based on a negative agenda is never enlightening. So the first way to find out is to ask the person about the Bible. Nothing like opening one’s mouth to actually ask a question rather than jump to a conclusion. So never jump to a conclusion about why someone has a book, especially before you even have a dialogue.

The second consideration is the age and stage of life of a person. Do you buy or read the same types of books that you did ten years ago or twenty years ago? Usually the answer to that is yes and no. For example, a person may be a lifelong fan of certain types of fiction, such as fantasy, science fiction, westerns, murder mysteries, romance novels etc. So while not always true, since tastes change, it is not unusual that a person who is a steady reader of books will have a certain type of literature or “escapist” novels that they will gravitate toward for long periods in their life. But often people change their taste as they just become sick of a type of book, the quality goes down, or a more interesting alternative arises. Self help books are an example of a genre of “nonfiction” (though most of them are fiction if people were being honest and ethical about it) that people tend to read during a phase in their life. An obvious example is that contently retired people tend not to read self help books, while younger people who are churning in some part of life tend to read self help books.

But when it comes to nonfiction books, tastes really do change with age. First of all, there are fads, such as the ever popular cookbooks, where a personality stimulates an interest in some topic, or new interest in food, or a type of nutrition or diet plan, develops. Second, though, there is a shift that takes place in many people as they age, though much less than it used to be (since so much of the population tries to stay juvenile in their self interest). But a very common phenomenon used to be that young people would be very interested in adventurous, counter cultural topics, only to find as they aged, had families, and were further in their careers, they did a flip and started exploring more conservative topics. The psychoanalyst Jung wrote quite a bit about that, likening it to developing an interest in the parts of your life you had to suppress before, so it's kind of your "B side," to use a record term (since I don't want to get into a whole psych discussion here). People who are counter cultural as young people often become interested in more conservative topics later in life, while the reverse is also true (though less so if conservative activities, such as raising a family, predominate). Again, this is not a value judgment, but explaining that all humans tend to have one or more shifts in interest conforming to their stages and circumstances in their life's cycle.

And here is the other problem with jumping to a conclusion. What if the person is reading those books not for their own needs or benefits, but to learn what works and does not work in helping others? Ah ha. Is the person who reads a book about a particular political stance, religious belief, or self help technique reading it because they are “searching” (yuck to that term, but that’s how the bloated new age squishy mindset views any intellectual or social query) or is the person reading that book because they have to relate to and get along with people who have those beliefs? Much of the library I used to have belonged to that category. I owned MANY books that had nothing to do with my personal beliefs, but were informative in understanding people who had those beliefs. I often had to hold my nose and I rarely actually read those books; they usually occupied space as reference. For example, I had a collection of books about ancient Egypt. Why? Not because I considered the belief of the pharaohs to be anything other than a steaming pile of crap. But one reason I had them is because there’s such a manic interest in pharaoh occult as part of the New Age disease. Even that would not have been enough of a reason for me to actually buy the books (and for many years I had only one book about Egypt in my collection at all) but I had second aesthetic reasons. I was very interested in their art color palette (especially for certain images such as the lotus, palm and so forth) and I also was going through a phase of being very interested in linguistics, and they plugged a gap in my survey of that topic. So the cultists morons who snooped in my house regularly jumped to an orgasm of conclusions about my having a lot of Egyptology books, without once ever asking me a single question about a single book.

So remember, it’s not like I’m really more mysterious and complicated than other folks. If I have a book for a reason that has to do with others rather than myself, then many other people have nuanced reasons for having certain reading books too, and they deserve to be understood honestly and openly.

Here is another thing that is kind of an old fashioned era thing that many cultists did not understand. I grew up poor and only had a few hardcover books as a teenager. The wealthy and elite belonged to “book clubs.” So when I earned a good salary I really enjoyed being able to buy hardcover books and build a library. I enjoyed belonging to book clubs. And more important, I liked patronizing certain book dealers, especially if they were individuals trying to stay in business. I bought from one of the finest traditional shops of antiquarian books in London, but I also bought from struggling artist sorts who sold books on the side and hand produced their catalogues. I deliberately placed regular orders with them in order to provide my support for their business, making myself choose from the books they had. Sometimes the books were “my cup of tea” and sometimes they weren’t. I often bought books just because I liked the cover, or enjoyed the illustrations, especially if it were wood block engravings of some skill. I cannot tell you how much it has hurt that I spent my money on people I thought were amiable colleagues who shared an interest in books (often spending way too much and going into debt) only to find out that they were part of the cultist spying and demonizing me based on “what books I selected.” I will never regain the trust that has been destroyed.

So this is an example of how one must be especially careful about drawing conclusions about another person’s mindset and stance based on very thin evidence such as taste in reading books. Of course that’s not so much a problem when one is going along with the crowd on pure mass media entertainment, such as reading the “Harry Potter” books. No one would jump to a conclusion that the person believed in magic just because he, she or their children were reading the Harry Potter books. The same with the phenomenal sales some years ago of the inspirational nonfiction book “The Purpose Driven Life.” That is an example where you will find the entire spectrum of readers and cannot jump to conclusions based on if, for example, you saw that book in a person’s home. The person may or may not be Christian, or active or believing in any way. They may or may not be looking for a “self help inspirational book,” or they may or may not want to read it so they can help others, or understand what others who struggle are saying or experiencing. They may read it for any of the reasons I listed above about the Bible (except I guess the grandparents would not have an antique edition, it’s too new for that!) It’s ironic that in an age when everyone is “seeking,” the owning of a book is immediately seen as “agreement with the topic of that book.” I mean, if a person already feels that way, do they need to read the book? One of the big conflicts in logic of modern thinking is to assume that everyone is 1) looking for “the answer” while at the same time believing the opposite which is 2) the person “agrees with” whatever they are reading at the time and must have a sympathy for the stance of the author, because otherwise, why buy the book? That’s an example of an inherent conflict in logic.

That’s all I really want to say for now on this topic. I hope you found this helpful, especially you young people who are reading (and who worry more about the cost of textbooks than some of these topics, but I use the topics as way to help you preserve and develop your best reasoning facilities!)