Words without Walls
July 3, 2018
John Stark, PhD.

On Pundits

 

“Silence without sound is like silence with sound, only without sound.”
(J E Stark, May 2018)

 

You may think the quote above is absolute nonsense.  Perhaps it is.  On the other hand, you may find yourself wondering about things you would have never considered if you had not read the quote.  If so, perhaps there is value in it.  A third option is that you tell yourself, “That sounds deep, but I don’t get it.” If that somehow makes you feel bad, I have done you (and the world) a disservice.

But there is a reason I chose to write this.  In 2018, one of my personal projects is to compare God’s wisdom with the short quotes from people who have been selected by editors and publishers as people who represent the wisdom of mankind.  Even though I wrote the opening quote, I assure you it fits right in with things I am finding in the “wisdom of the world” category.

Here is one from Stephen Hawking:

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

Now that’s a quote to brighten anyone’s day, providing reason and purpose to our lives and bringing hope to the hopeless.   Hmm. Do you think?

Let’s try this:

You made my whole being;
you formed me in my mother’s body.
I praise you because you made me
in an amazing and wonderful way.
What you have done is wonderful.
I know this very well.
You saw my bones being formed
as I took shape in my mother’s body.
When I was put together there,
you saw my body as it was formed.
All the days planned for me
were written in your book
before I was one day old.
(Psalm 139:13-16, New Century Version)

Even if we grant equal truth value to the two quotes (which I do not) I would still prefer to read, hear, and embrace the Psalm 139 version of our existence as human beings:  Look at it this way: Would you rather see yourself as blotch of chemical scum smeared over the surface of an unexceptional planet, or would you rather be someone God made in love to be exactly like you are?

As I write this, I wonder what kind of decisions chemical scum gets to make, and I realize I get to make a decision between which of these two “quotes from pundits” will echo in my thoughts the rest of today, and into the next few weeks and years.  The choice seems easy.  I choose to reflect on the Psalm’s explanation of my presence.  Which one will you choose?

Choose wisely,

           John
For your information:

“A pundit is a person who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences, technology or sport) on which he or she is knowledgeable (or can at least appear to be knowledgeable), or considered a scholar in said area.”  (Wikipedia, July 2018)