You May Not Be A Critical Thinker If You’ve Said These Things

With the political season heating up, it may become difficult for even the most thoughtful people to remain respectful during election debates.  We could all use a reminder on the way to maintain civil discourse and keep debates focused on real arguable issues.  Having the freedom to debate and state our opinions is what makes this country great.  Voting is a privilege and we should treat it seriously.  This requires careful consideration and critical thought before casting our vote. 

The essence of critical thinking requires questioning.  A critical thinker must question everything he or she is told or believes and this includes even that which the person considers common sense. Critical thinkers are open minded because they seek to draw conclusions after asking many questions both about the information they receive and that which they locate through research. It requires us to think further and consider both our position and try to see the other side.

Here are some examples that may indicate a lack of critical thinking:

1. President Obama is evil. Mitt Romney is evil. Joe Biden is evil. Paul Ryan is evil. There many variations of this. Each reflects a lapse in critical thinking.  Just because you differ with any of these men on political or social policy does not make them evil. 

2.  President Obama, Mitt Romney, etc., doesn’t like America.  Why would anyone subject himself or herself to all the rigors of running for office if he or she did not genuinely love this country?  Could we just allow for the possibility that each candidate is truly patriotic?

3.  President Obama was not born in the country.  Please put this one to rest.  He was born in Hawaii and has the birth certificate to prove it. 

4.  President Obama (or President Bush) is not my president.  If you are an American, the president is your president.  You may not have voted for this person, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is (or was) the president.

5.  I’m leaving the country if Obama or Romney wins.  Please stop making empty threats like this one. If you think the value of living in the U.S. is conditional upon the current president, you are missing a great deal. 

There many examples of a lack of critical thought.  These are just a few. 

Please remember that the goal is not to call people out for their lapses in critical thought because we have all (myself included) made mistakes.  Let’s all make a vow to refrain from personally attacking those who disagree with our point of view. Civil discourse is possible and it is necessary.

 

Advertisement

2 thoughts on “You May Not Be A Critical Thinker If You’ve Said These Things

  1. Counter Argument:

    1) Are those four human? Yes. Then they are fundamentally evil. Show me one human who has live a perfect life and has never done a single selfish thing. Is Obama a progressive? Yes. Then he on a fundamental political level is evil because ultimately he does not believe in personal liberty. Are the others still evil? Yes, but maybe not as much. They still are not perfect. 😉
    2) Obama is an anti-colonialist. He’s running for president (again) so that he can diminish America so that third world nations like Kenya can rise up. This goes back to fulfilling not his dreams, but rather the dreams of his father… who is from Kenya (hmmm sounds like a book title written by a known terrorist). He fully subscribes to the idea that there is only so much wealth in the world and it needs to be better distributed among the nations.
    3) I can prove that the birth certificate issues by Hawaii is not a scanned copy. Anybody with Adobe Illustrator can do this. I cannot prove that it is not real however 😉 He doesn’t have to be a foreign born American to hate the US though.
    4) I’ll agree to this one 🙂
    5) And this one too.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s