Dead Right
Dead Right
When Certainty Becomes the Enemy of Truth
There are few things more dangerous than being wrong.
Except perhaps being certain.
Most of us can remember something we once believed without hesitation—
something we defended, taught, repeated, argued about, perhaps even built
portions of our lives around—only to discover later that we were mistaken.
Not slightly mistaken.
Dead wrong.
The unsettling part is that while we believed it, we weren’t uncertain.
We were dead right.
We had evidence.
We had experience.
We had tradition.
We had authorities.
Some of us even had Bible verses.
And yet we were wrong.
History is filled with things humanity once “knew.”
We knew the earth was the center of the universe.
We knew illnesses were caused by things we later discovered had nothing to do
with them.
We knew certain races were inferior to others.
We knew slavery could be justified.
We knew women were intellectually and emotionally unsuited for leadership.
We knew children should be seen and not heard.
We knew grief followed predictable stages.
We knew people struggling emotionally simply needed to toughen up.
And religious people have had their own impressive collection of certainties.
We knew who God accepted.
We knew who God rejected.
We knew who was going to heaven.
We knew who was going to hell.
We knew which denomination had the truth.
We knew exactly what particular passages of Scripture meant.
We knew what God thought about people we had never bothered to know.
And sometimes we were willing to destroy relationships defending those
conclusions. We were dead right. Until we weren’t.
Perhaps one of the greatest signs of maturity is not finally possessing all the right answers.
Perhaps it is becoming less frightened of discovering that some of our answers were wrong.
Because truth has nothing to fear from examination. Only certainty does.
This book is not an argument for believing nothing.
It is an invitation to hold what we believe with enough humility that truth is still
permitted to surprise us.
It asks a disturbing question:
What if some of the things I am absolutely certain about today are the very things I
will someday wish I had questioned?
And an even more uncomfortable one:
What has my need to be right cost me?