Christians are commanded to love God with all of their minds, and when we refuse to do so, we are being disobedient and sinning against God. If things can be more easily twisted or misunderstood online, then that is all the more reason to take greater care in what we share and how we present things.

Christians, just as much as anyone else, are called to think straight. Believers are meant to use their minds for the glory of God, and not be sloppy and lazy when it comes to their thinking. As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers.” He went on to say this:

If you are thinking of being a Christian, I warn you: you are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book [The Pilgrim’s Progress] that has astonished the whole world.

But I encounter shallow and sloppy thinking far too often amongst believers. It almost seems that some of them actually delight in not using their brains for Christ and the Kingdom. Thus you so often hear some real howlers coming from various believers.

That in part is why some years ago I set up a new theological subcategory, “Dumb Theology Posters” This is my 34th article in this section. As that title implies, you really find plenty of poor thinking on the social media, often in the form of memes, posters, quotes and so on. Basic clarity of thought and logic seems to go missing there far too often.

Anyone who has taken a course in logic or has read up on it knows that there are various logical fallacies to be aware of and guarded against. Some basic ones include the strawman argument, begging the question, and the category mistake. If you want a bit more info on these, see this earlier piece of mine.

Another quite common logical fallacy is known as the false dilemma. There are various ways this fallacy expresses itself. One is to demand an either/or when a both/and is the way to go. Or it can involve a situation in which two alternative points of view are held to be the only options, but in reality there exist one or more other options which have not been considered.

Something Charles Spurgeon once said is an example of the former. When he was asked which was more important, prayer or Bible reading, he famously replied with these words: “What is more important: breathing in or breathing out?”

An example of the latter would be something like this: Some folks will insist that either you love heroin addicts and support heroin injecting rooms, or you just want them to die. But there is a third option of course. Because you love the drug addict and want him to live, you will seek to get him free of his addiction. Getting him off drugs is the loving thing to do.

But as I keep saying, there is a never-ending supply of loose thinking in general, and false dilemmas in particular. Let me share two more that I have recently come upon on the social media. One meme that is making the rounds says this: “The Bible isn’t a rule book, it’s a love letter. It’s the story of God’s heart for His people.”

This is another one of those things where you have to reply with a ‘yes and no’. Yes, in one sense it contains the words of a loving God to his people. But no, that is far from what the Bible is only all about. The truth is, there are hundreds, if not thousands of rules or commands found throughout the Scriptures.

And the best way to show the silliness of this meme is to look at the relationship between love and commands. Way too many believers glibly claim that the two could not be further apart, and that love is not something that can be commanded or ordered.

Um, these folks need to start reading their Bibles. Consider Deuteronomy 6:4-6: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.”

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