Definition of Paradigm
: a theory or a group of ideas about how something should be done, made, or thought about
In addition to this definition, another way to understand the idea of paradigm is that it is the perspective from which one views situations, actions and decisions.
A paradigm is a model of understanding consistently free of significant contradictions
It guides our expectations and helps us to sort, organize, and classify information.
It affects the way information is processed by the brain and the types of questions we ask when trying to understand the world around us incorporating as it does, all of the knowledge and experiences we have acquired since birth. We all build internal models of our world, which we rely upon to understand it and to assure our survival in it.
Our brain uses paradigms to classify, sort, and process information received by the senses.
It is consistently free of significant contradictions and even when it isn’t, it still works, because we can shift in and out of various paradigms, although not always as well as we would like.
It guides our expectations and helps us to sort, organize, and classify information that we receive from our five senses.
A paradigm may be personal or cultural, and we each have many different paradigms for different contexts.
Paradigms affect the types of questions we ask as individuals and as cultures, when we are trying to make sense of the world around us. They incorporate the knowledge and experiences we have acquired since birth as we become conditioned to our physical, social, and spiritual environment.
The Fractional Banking System
As persons, we learn, hold and maintain many paradigms throughout our lives in order to make our lives more livable. How we think about things and from what perspective helps to set up our expectations and allow us to take actions without having to consider all of the potential adverse consequences of what could happen every time we take an action. It is really shorthand for holding the ideas of our belief systems in place in our minds.
If you take the existing modern banking system in Western society. There is a paradigm that underlies all of the actions that go on both by the bank’s customers and the bank’s employees. While the paradigm is really not true when push comes to shove, the mistaken paradigm is what allows modern banking to operate on a daily basis. The paradigm basically goes like this; I will let the bank hold my money and they will either give me interest(money back) for letting them have access to my money or they will charge me a fee for holding my money and giving me and all of the other people and institutions with whom I do business, access to my money. I will access at any time online in order to move the money or make payments to others and others will have access to my money when I have made a legally sufficient payment transaction for something to the seller of an item or service. If I want my money out of their bank, I will have the right to be able to get my money out of their bank if and when I want it.
The truth of the fractional banking system is far different than what I believe, assume, presuppose, or think. Banking rules and regulations are made by the government and most people would be very surprised to find out that banks are not required to keep all of their customer’s money available should many of their customer’s want their money out at the same time. A “banking run” is when a lot of people want their cash out of the bank at the same time. Since modern banks are usally missing at least 90% of their customer’s cash on a given day, if 50% of the deposits were required to be paid out on any given day, there would be a lot of surprised and angry people who would not be able to get a penny of their money out.
A paradigm shift occurs usually during or right before a banking crisis when the word starts to get out that the fractional banking system might fail or a particular bank might fail and that you had better get to the front of the line in order to get to the little bit of money that the bank actually has sitting their for the depositors. The shift is new information or the realization of their earlier denial that their money was “safe in the bank”. It is a change in their belief system or it is a loss of faith in the fractional banking system itself.
The fractional banking system only works if everyone has faith that they can get all of their money back at any time they want. While we have not had major bank runs for several generations, when bank runs were occurring in US history every decade or so, people did not have such blind faith in fractional banking. Why, because the truth and reality is that your money is not their if everyone wants their money at the same time. Our paradigm in this case(even though it is false) is easier to easier to maintain that to worry about what to do with your money every time you were paid.
How would you turn your paycheck into cash every pay period? Where would you keep the cash once you received it? Would it be safe under your mattress? How will you pay everyone you owe with cash? How will you get cash out to your children away from home in college? What if the house burns down with twenty-thousand dollars under your mattress? In other words, everyone goes along with the fiction that all is well in the fractional banking system when in truth, the very opposite is the same. If you don’t believe this, just ask people living in Greece over the past decade or so when their banking system seized up. While this paradigm is based upon a lie, even paradigms based on truth are only as good as the information available to the persons determining the truth of the paradigm at the time they are making the determination. Scientific information as to what man has deduced about the world in which we live continually changes. What we think is true today, might not be considered true in the future. The problem is that we base a lot of our actions on our belief in the paradigm so if the paradigm is incorrect, most if not all of what we do in response to those incorrect beliefs will be wrong and ultimately, not helpful.
The idea of the problem of stomach ulcers comes to mind as a paradigm that shifted in my lifetime. When I was a child, medical professionals told us that stress caused extra acid to build up in our stomachs and damaged the stomach linings of such stressed out persons. Drinking milk, taking antacids, lots of commercials for both all were the treatment to help calm down the acid which in turn would reduce the damage to the stomach linings of millions of people. Even psychological drugs were prescribed such as ( hld mother, my father) to make you relax more and stress less, again, to reduce the stomach acid’s effect on stomach lining.
A paradigm shift of sorts occurred though, when researchers found that the two main causes of stomach ulcers are an infection with the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori (H. Pylori) and long-term use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as aspirin, ibuprofen, or naproxen. If you are older, you know this to be true and if you are younger, you cannot imagine all of the talk between people, doctor’s order to patients, business plans for over the counter drug companies, advertising campaigns, money spent on tv and radio advertising, pharmacuetical company plans and roll outs etc., etc., etc. Lots of time, energy, resources, directives, actions by almost the entire society was spent needlessly and worthlessly responding to a problem in the wrong way.
When a belief or a group of beliefs that we hold are not true in any sense(one must believe that truth exists separately from anything or anyone’s belief as to its truth), the results are the same every time like for the short example of stomach ulcers above.
When trying to get over top of whether firmly held, societal-wide beliefs are true and helpful or not, the sincerity of one’s belief does not matter as all. A person could 100% believe that the moon is made of cheese. Even though they believe with all of their hearts that the moon is actually swiss, their sincerity has no impact of whether it is or it isn’t. In another way, no matter how much a person believes that they can run their gasoline fitted engine in their car with water, it won’t matter why or how much they really believe- gasoline engines run on gas type products and won’t run on water.
Without digressing too much here, no matter how much and how sincerely a 45 year old man believes that he is a 5 year old girl, it doesn’t change the fact that he is not. The same goes for the people that believe that they are dogs, cats, or even hippopotamus’s- they are not. Finally, even those who believe they are the opposite sex when every demonstrable, provable scientific tests says othewise, they are not.
When we stray away from truth, there is only one place to go and that is to delusion. I do not know of anyone who purposely wants to live under a certain delusion or to live in delusion all of the time. If you do, you still risk the chance of being institutionalized if the sum of your delusional living keeps you from taking care of yourself or if you are a danger to others.
The other way to consider the idea of a paradigm is to think about the word perspective. In webster, perspective means
A particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.
The best examples of the idea of perspective or how we are looking at things can be seen in the following mind-blowing multiple perpective drawings. Take a minute or two and check out the following pictures and questions for a quick and powerful understanding of perspective and on our understanding of truthfulness of our own perspectives.
Double perspective pictures
While one might see one thing from one perspective and one might see another thing from another perspective, there is a limitation of how many different fully formed pictures are included in each picture. The bottom line truth is that the person who created the picture is the one who determined how many different pictures were designed. If the artist created two pictures, even though a person can only see one, that doesn’t mean that they are correct, again, no matter how sincerely they believe their answer. If a person only asks questions about the picture that regard the one picture of the witch, that makes it harder to see the other picture contained along with the witch. Their framing of the questions to skew you to only see the witch does not effect the truth that there is also a picture of a woman there as well. To ask, “do you see a witch in the picture” is not the best way to think about the picture if you are trying to get to truth. The better way is something like, “how many different pictures do you see, or what picture other than the witch do you see”?
An example of this type of trying to put the wrong or a false perspective onto a topic is when people frame the argument over abortion as a matter of choice. While choice is an important issue when discussing abortion issues, it is by far, not the most helpful way to debate it. Why? Because everything we do comes down to a choice and therefore, most mature, thinking people believe that you should be able to freely make the important decisions of your life for yourself. Although, children, the extreme elderly and those with mental incapicitations should have help and support for them so they don’t make bad decisions that risk hurting themselves.
Let’s finish up with a quick overview of the paradigm shift in the church about how salvation is obtained that ocurred due to the reformation in the 16th and 17 centuries.
Prior to Martin Luther’s writing of the 95 Thesis that he nailed to a church door in protest of church practices and teachings, the Catholic church claimed to have power over how long a deceased person would have to spend time in Purgatory. Purgatory, under Catholic doctrine, was a place between heaven and hell that a person would go to have their sins purged so they could eventually move on to heaven. Wilder yet, the church would charge and accept money from relatives of the deceased to shorten their purgatory sentences. Luther’s writings were very critical of these practices(as you would hope) and also came to stand for two other hugely important points about the christian faith. One, that salvation is by faith alone and not by works and two, that we are to only use scripture as the source for determining truths for Christian life and teachings.
These changes about what was true about the Christian faith and where and how we were to determine truth upended Catholic doctrines, individual practices, and entire religious systems of the day ultimately birthing Protestantism as the true form of Christianity for the world. All world religious systems have their adherents working to get to heaven by being “good” or by doing more good works than bad.
A Simple Pardigm shift is all is takes to change the course of your life for ever
The paradigm shift to salvation by “faith alone” and through the work of Jesus rather than our works is something so profound, that only believers in this truth can fully explain all of the ramifications for one’s beliefs, life and works. Limiting our ultimate truths to the scriptures is also a huge change from other religions. As is is said, all persons have a final arbitor(decider) of what is true or not true about life and our how we intersect with that truth. For some, it is themselves as they are a law unto themselves, meaning they get to decide it all. They can decide the true meaning of life and the code of contact that they should follow in their own lives. Some people choose the Pope as the final arbitor of truth for their lives. Seeing this current pope in action should offer enough evidence that this too might not be a great idea. Others choose the teachings of Buddha and Allah while some people don’t even get this far in their intellectual and spiritual development and don’t even think about it.
What Martin Luther ultimately did to the Catholic Church’s financial system of indulgences changed the lives and beliefs of many people suffering under that wrong and corrupt system. People who abandoned this corrupt system were freed from the guilt and stress of trying to earn enough money to lesson the torment of their dearly departed relatives. They lost the fear, guilt, and self-condemnation that came from a works-oriented salvation paradigm where you never believed you could measure up.
The sad truth about that works system is that in all examples of the devil’s methods to fool man and place him in bondage, the truth that people felt that they could never measure up to such a standard to be able to get to heaven on their own was indeed true! If this weren’t true, we would never need a savior! That would mean that God the Father unnecessarily had Jesus not not only go through the torture and crucification death by the Romans but also placed His wrath upon Jesus for no reason.
Additionally, as in the case of stomach ulcers, can you imagine all of the thought, effort, stress and resources that were spent by people trying to follow God to earn their salvation or to minimize the punishment in Purgatory under the errant direction of Catholic teaching? The point to these examples of wrong paradigms is that theology matters and our paradigms(concepts about how and what to think) about theology has huge importance for our lives. Gong forward, I will demonstrate how we need paradigm shifts in the several areas of christian theology in order to operate more like our example, our Messiah, Jesus and how he lived His life. These paradigm shifts or informtion updates leading to a truer understanding of our Christian lives will help us defeat the current sin epidemic so that we really have the victory promised to us by Jesus and the bible through His death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead and His ascension to the right hand of the Father.
Theology is important. What we believe(our paradigm) is important. The application of those beliefs to action in what we choose to spend our time, engergy and resources on is important in our sanctification process. Wrong beliefs leading to wrong actions and behaviors lead to spiritual defeat. Right beliefs and understanding leading to the right use of time, energy, resources and directives lead us to spiritual victories. That is why our beliefs, understanding and actions to the degree we can about God and our christianity(Theology) matter greatly.