My husband was telling me yesterday about a class he is taking at work on how to bring about change in the workplace. The book he is reading for the class talks about the fact that people make decisions based on emotions more than they realize, and that this fact needs to be accounted for when encouraging co-workers to make changes.
The author of the book talked about how a group of professionals thought they were making rational decisions about their work, but the author didn’t think they really were. I could see the authors point a bit, but wasn’t so sure that the author didn’t jump to his own conclusions to satisfy his need for data. There were other examples presented in the book that clearly sounded like people were acting on emotion, but I was not so sure about this one.
This got me thinking about what is rational? In the western world we have come to define “rational” as coming up with decisions based on careful weighing of data that we can receive empirically. However, before God was kicked out of the picture several centuries ago, rational thought was considered to be decisions based on the careful weighing of what it was thought that God would want.
Which is truly more rational? To make good decisions you need to have as much true information as possible. None of knows what is really true about any situation, except for God.
In current western thinking it was not rational for Joshua to march around the city of Jericho once for 6 days, then 7 times on the 7th day. But it worked. Why, because he made his decisions based on all truth about the situation – he talked to the Guy who knew all.
If we all chose true rationality, which is the one thing that is supposed to set us apart from the rest of the creatures of this world, just think what a wonderful place this would be, and how great our lives would be.
Hmmmm, can anyone say, “Heaven”?…
"Most Likely to Succeed" 