Strongholds are things we believe to be true yet are lies. These lies we often protect ferociously. We build walls around them an nurture them with emotion.

The things we feel very strongly about yet know almost nothing about are the things we very often are the most deceived about.

Sometimes it is the things we are most naive about that make us the most stubborn.

That’s how deception works best, it goes after emotion first, data and facts are avoided.

We put an emotional wall around our strongholds. The lies we believe we often emotionally hold on to. Many of us won’t give these strongholds up without a fight. Unless we are trained to.

A friend on Facebook pointed this to be an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

From Wikipedia:

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their cognitive abilityas greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of  illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

I think Dunning Kruger partially describes this but it doesn’t explain the strong emotional wall we build around the deception we believe yet know almost nothing about.

Not being able to assess our own lack of mental ability is one thing. But getting furious about something we think we know about, yet know few in any real facts about is an entirely different thing.

I think there is another force at play. A force pushing us toward believing things that are false. Then defending those false beliefs with anger.

There is a simple cure for this problem of strongholds. A cure available to anyone and everyone. It’s not schooling and degrees. It’s not access to brilliant people. It is none other than a constant seeking of Jesus Christ.

Pursuit of Jesus Christ keeps us emotionally disconnected from ideas other than him. When he is our universe of truth the deception that can control us tends to break down over time. The strongholds get weakened over time. They don’t have a strong foundation if Jesus himself is in our lives laying our foundation and uprooting deception.

He leads us to reconsider things over and over again. Nothing but him is off limits for rethinking and re-consideration.

When someone says things to us that trigger anger and strong disagreement, those are precisely the things we should evaluate the most.

Do we feel the way we do because of something we know or something we believe out of tradition or emotion?