Online Debates

I’ve learned that online debates—social media squabbles, nasty email exchanges, critical private messages, and everything else—are rarely about being right, defending a truth, arguing for moral integrity.They indeed masquerade as that.They’re like that old story where the "mob" caught the woman in the act of adultery, put her on display, and then argued whether she should be stoned. She was caught. She’s weak. She’s an easy target. She’ll do. (Psst. She wasn’t the problem. The rabble-rouser rabbi was.) *When the world is spinning out of control, everyone desires a centering point, a magnetic north, something that is stable and trustworthy. It takes work to discover and articulate that. Always has. Now is no different than before. Except now we have an easier time fighting false enemies and defending arbitrary boundaries. We can open our phone and embark on a Facebook crusade faster than it takes to read the back cover of a book on, say, anger management.Here’s the catch-22: If the world is chaotic, we reach for the easiest target to shoot because it soothes anxiety and feels like stability; if we all shoot at the easiest targets, no one finds depth and stability, and the world feels more chaotic and unstable. And we have more anxiety.The chaos is in part the cause of our own doing—finding easy solutions (that don’t usually work) to problems (that aren’t really the problem).Usually, as far as I can tell, online debates are distractions from the real problems.People like us that are unwilling to continue in ways like this don’t settle for highly charged online debates. We ask ourselves, “What’s the problem we’re hiding from here?”, and then we do the work to understand.*John 8:1-11