The Egotism and Narcissism of Our Beliefs about Cause and Effect
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
When I was around 12 years of age, I was walking home from school and I spotted some daises in a field. I had heard that if you plucked the petals off the daisy one by one and while doing so said, "She loves me. She loves me not", you could find out whether she did or not. With the last petal I said, "She loves me." Well, the next day I found out that she did not love me; she loved someone else. I thought to myself, "Damn, I would never have believed that daises would lie to me."
I heard of plane crash in which one hundred people died and man survived. When interviewed on TV he said he thanked God for saving his life. The family of one of victims who died heard this interview. They found out where the survivor lived and where he went to church. The first thing they did was to go and blow up his church. The next thing they did was to go, shoot, and kill the survivor. As he lay dying, the family all said to him, "OK, God somehow missed this one. Now we just corrected His mistake!"
In high school, I played football. Before the game, the coach would have us pray for God to help us win. Losing meant we had not prayed earnest enough. If we won, we all thought that God thought that the other team did not deserve to win. We thought that perhaps they were not true believers or they were evil people. At any rate, we surely did believe that God was on our side that night.
I was waiting for the bus the other day and a man there was talking with his female companion. He said that every time he saw the coast was clear he would start to walk across the street and, sure enough, speeding cars would come out of nowhere. He said that there was something about him that made traffic show up just when he thought the coast was clear. I laughed and he turned and said to his companion and me, "See, he knows what I am talking about." I said, jokingly, sure, it is just cause and effect. He gloated to his companion, "Yeah, that’s it, cause and effect!"
What can we learn from these examples?
I could go on, and on, and on with examples like this. However, what is the point of these anecdotes? Many, perhaps most, people tend to have a very egocentric, narcissistic understanding of cause and effect.
Is it any wonder then that Bush believes that God is on his side and Pastor Hagey believes that Hitler was carrying out God’s will against the Jews?
These were my Memorial Day Reflections. Bush and Pastor Hagey: So much in common and with the destiny of so many in their hands.