Session Six

Exercise 1:

“pride or prejudice?”

Background:

“The secret of a great life is often a man's success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them and so learning to walk in the true path.” – Os Guinness, The Call

This week we are focusing on knowledge and discernment.

Instruction:

Read the article “Did Jesus Smoke?” at www.ransomfellowship.org/D_Smoke.html and answer the questions at the end.

          Exercise 2

Instruction:

In the first session, the ability to think without thinking was discussed and in particular, some examples from Gladwell’s book “Blink” was shared. The premise is that our supposed intuition and fast-decision making ability are really trained formally or informally, and often in our sub-conscious. Which means we are affected by what we take in from various knowledge influences, this also means that we can change our ability to make good fast-decisions and have good intuition if we train ourselves with good authoritative guides.

Have some fun and see how you may be influenced in ways you might not realize. Go the website https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit and take some of their tests on race, gender, jobs, politics and more. You can choose to take some of their demonstration tests, and see whether you may have some unrealized prejudices.

If you are surprised, consider how you might be able to better train yourself. You might even be able to do it quickly and retake the test and see if it makes a difference.