Am I opinionated? Generally I would say I am not. Opinionated means thinking that ones own opinions of things are absolutes without reference to the actual truth of a matter or without openness to the views of others that could modify my own opinions. For example, I would never say that I am right about healthy eating choices since I know few facts in that area, even though I have my own opinions.
However, there is another brand of being opinionated that surfaced that I do fall into. This is generalizing from my own experience or my own knowledge of others, making that into a sentence that says “Most people in this category are like this.”
However, there is another brand of being opinionated that surfaced that I do fall into. This is generalizing from my own experience or my own knowledge of others, making that into a sentence that says “Most people in this category are like this.”
It came up in an interesting context last week. I was chatting about how cradle Catholics can’t even imagine how cradle atheists, like myself, were brought up to think. We were so totally materialistic as to think that a human being is just a grain of sand on the beach with an id attached.
 | Being a twin with no younger child in the house and never seeing babies except in prams on the street, I actually thought of a baby as a mound of matter with ooze coming out of both ends. |  |
An amused listener to these outrageous confessions pointed out that most atheists are more humanistic than I was. They certainly would think of the human being as highly valuable with some rights if not all the rights that a theist would insist on.
Generalizing from this discussion, I realize that I, myself, and many others are opinionated when we leap from our own experience to huge generalizations as in “my family was of this ethnic background. All, say, Italians, were so proud of being of that ancestry. “All”? Why not “many” or “probably most.”
I am trying to catch myself in the interests of truth being higher than freedom of bias!
Generalizing from this discussion, I realize that I, myself, and many others are opinionated when we leap from our own experience to huge generalizations as in “my family was of this ethnic background. All, say, Italians, were so proud of being of that ancestry. “All”? Why not “many” or “probably most.”
I am trying to catch myself in the interests of truth being higher than freedom of bias!
| I am teaching a distance learning class out of Holy Apostles on the Novel. I am doing themes in the novels and my co-teacher the literary criticism aspects. We are reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Romantic love, its joys and pitfalls, is, of course a theme. |  I put up this post on our discussion board: My take as a widow is this: For some, romantic love starts by making an idol of the beloved. |
Then, if they marry, seeing the spouse as a fallen idol.
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With forgiveness of the real flaws of the other, not the flaw of just not being perfect which was an illusion, comes seeing the other as a funny little creature and laughing at the same things we used to hate each other for.
It is easier to like to be a funny little creature vs. an idol, if we give our hearts, first and foremost, to God and love each other in God. Then we don't expect, and fail to find, our happiness totally in the spouse's love for us. With the horizon of infinite perfect love of God for us in heaven as a possibility, our co-dependence on the spouse and anger at his/her flaws diminishes greatly.
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