THE PATHETIC FALLACY
|| This summary written on Thursday 7th September 2023
One of the challenges with being a sensitive person, particularly when working with the spirit world is in how our heightened senses can, and often do, spill into our day to day lives.
We have a feeling, an instinctive sense about something around us and we inadvertently seek the evidence to confirm we’re right. We become more tolerant of how strong the evidence is to support our feeling and often seek signs within our environment. We may see signs in the clouds, the weather, the temperature or other environmental conditions.
The remarkably funny northern comedian, Peter Kay, has a piece where he describes being at a funeral for a relative. The day was windy, and the mourners are talking alongside the new grave about the person. An empty Cheesy Quavers packet blows past them all and they all claim immediately that it must be from the deceased relative who happened to love them.
We’ve all been to similar funerals where we’ve commented that the weather reflects the deceased person. It might be cold, rainy and dark, or bright and warm. We associate that with the person we mourn. It’s a pathetic fallacy, nothing more.
Pathetic fallacy occurs when we add emotions to a non-emotional state. We do this more often than we might be aware of.
'The weather is miserable outside.'
The state of the world often inspires us to believe things are bad and that the past times were better. We’re drawn into the pathetic fallacy syndrome, believing that because there is Russian aggression in the east, another world war looms ever closer. That is not so. There has always been instabilities around the world and there’s never been a point in history when the world was free of conflict, somewhere on the place.
But, reverse the question, has there ever been a time when there was no peace anywhere in the world? No. There has always been peace happening somewhere at some time.
But even though these facts are exciting, I still find myself wondering when this world will change and mankind will live in more peace and harmony together. Sometimes when I hear the negative news on our television screens, I allow myself to worry about the state of the world. The global state has become a pathetic fallacy.
The speaker in today’s message offers me words of comfort, obviously realising that I was worrying about the state of things around the world. They refer to ‘the cycle of life’. Things come and things go. They always have and they always will. ~