Pratt: Knowing the difference between reality and wishful thinking

I cannot speak for others, but one of the most common questions I get is “where do you get your ideas?”

How do I answer that? Probably the same place everyone else gets ideas — we just hold up our hands and wave until we get the attention of the Almighty chief idea correspondent.

So, if you don't like our ideas, just take it up with the Idea Chief of the Universe. But sometimes life gets so complicated that the big chief is too busy to answer. That's when some of us try to...what is that saying from a younger generation … “Fake it 'til you make it.”

What wisdom!

We are not the first nor the last to learn what the creator of the Barnum & Bailey era noted about our forefathers. We are a gullible lot. We had rather be tricked than to do the work of discovering reality.

The biggest problem with this recognition is actually knowing the difference between reality and wishful thinking.

For example, on today's news there were serious comments about how “unfair” life is for those who believe they were born into the wrong identity — male or female, whichever case is found uncomfortable.

Right now, our “sensitive” society is showing compassion for males under treatment with sex-change chemicals, etc., who want to compete in the woman's division of swimming. Are women crashing the men's contest?

As has become all too common, it isn't the “facts of life” that matter, but the amount of “sensitivity and compassion” we show for self-deluded folks. One she-fellow is out there winning over the other women contestants. That there is a size-muscle inequity built into the premise is no problem, no matter how many hormone treatments it takes, supporters say.

For the first time, maybe, it appears that the dumb good 'ole boys out in the hinterlands of the country have more sense, common as it may be to the, ahem, “uppity” class who want to tend everyone's business. They cite what they see as their superior positions, which may be wealth, politics, religion, paranoia and/or mental aberrations.

Now, do you see how easy it is in today's world to take an idea from the morning news and run with it until you are proclaimed of unsound mind by the self-designated intelligentsia on Network News?

Meanwhile, as I ponder this argument about mixed swimming, I long for the days when the biggest clash in some church circles, was “mixed” swimming. Now we have it, and the same people who argued that boys and girls should not get half-naked into a pool now want them to swim together.

Have those critics given up their religious certainty and crossed to the other side of the argument or is the genetic pool just continuing to get weaker?

I do wonder about the best-known biblical twins Esau and Jacob, sons of Isaac, whose descendants still fight over which cousins God loves best.

A wise king quickly solved an issue between two women, each claiming to be the birth mother, by ordering they cut the baby boy in half to share. (1 Kings 3:15-38)

My thought: Our brains were newer then. Soloman had no problem knowing how to determine the real mother. Today, we seem really confused. Male or female? Choose for yourself, some say.

Conclusion: The nuts are still falling from the trees, so I will let you work out this swim contest thing while I go pick up some more pecans to store against what may be a coming famine of biblical proportions.

Beth Pratt retired after 25 years as the religion editor of the Avalanche-Journal.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Pratt: Knowing the difference between reality and wishful thinking