Stay in School, Kids.

The devil plays a lot of tricks and one of his biggest ones is deluding the saints into believing that intellectualism is the enemy of God.

And it's not just the saints. Anti-intellectualism spreads far and wide by the second, as people with zero expertise feel more than qualified to discredit those with all the expertise and social media gurus with zero credibility gain mass followers while the credible sources only reach a fraction of their numbers.

(Now this isn't all unfounded, as academia does not exist in a bubble and it can be used as a weapon against the marginalized, but that's another story)

But anti-intellectualism among believers is, well, peculiar. And not in a good way. I understand that college isn't for everyone, but I've never seen a particular group of people be so proud of not going to college because they think they've escaped indoctrination (but watch Fox News?) than Christians. The only thing that got indoctrinated into me during college was a messed up sleep schedule. I'm still trying to recover.

I also find the lack of curiosity and the reliance on group think and repeated phrases as doctrine to be disappointing. Don't believe me? Go tell the closest evangelical you know that 2 Chronicles 7:14 was not, cannot, and will not about America and let me know how it goes.

Anyways, i'm thinking about Bible study this week and how we started out with a brief history of the Bible and how studying Biblical history can be exciting and enthralling, but then also give you an existential crisis and make you question everything you knew about everything.

History is not merely the memorization of dates and what happened on them, and one event in history can have so many different perspectives and so many factors that led up to those different perspectives and so many outcomes and ramifications based on those factors, and so on and so forth.

History is like life, with ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, heroes, villains, and everyone else in between. When we delude ourselves into whitewashing history to spare feelings and temperments, we do this at our own peril. Everyone's stories and everyone's perspectives deserve to be heard, so we can figure out who's telling the truth and move everyone forward.

But if you're determined not to learn anything, well, good luck to you.

Be strong and take heart,

Toyin