{"id":3106,"date":"2023-10-27T07:39:39","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T11:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=3106"},"modified":"2023-10-27T07:41:32","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T11:41:32","slug":"head-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/27\/head-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Head Games"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>
 
It was a strange interview.
 
A young man, hoping to serve as the naturalist on the 1831 voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle<\/em> as it surveyed the coastline of South America, sat before British Captain Robert FitzRoy.
 
FitzRoy was impressed.  This candidate seemed both bright and congenial.  But something was wrong.  It was the young man\u2019s nose.  In the captain\u2019s estimation, it wasn\u2019t the nose of a real naturalist. 
 
Years later, FitzRoy admitted to the young man that he almost turned him away because of that facial feature.  In the end, he decided to throw caution to the wind.  He went ahead and invited Charles Darwin to join his crew.  Even if we don\u2019t applaud all of Darwin\u2019s scientific or philosophical conclusions, no one doubts that he belongs in the ranks of history\u2019s greatest naturalists.
 
So, what\u2019s the deal with his nose? 
 
Darwin\u2019s nose was perfectly normal.  But he lived during a time when a number of esteemed anatomists believed they had cracked the code of human character and behavior.  
 
All you had to do was study someone\u2019s head.
 
Phrenologists (popularly known as \u201cbump doctors\u201d) believed they could accurately discern someone\u2019s personal strengths and weaknesses by assessing the bumps on their head.  Over time, the human skull was painstakingly mapped to provide a guidebook for this process.  
 
Practitioners of craniometry, on the other hand, dismissed phrenologists as hopeless quacks, since they took a much more scientific approach to the measurement of skulls and brains.
 
Today we know that both disciplines were much ado about nothing.   
 
Bill Bryson writes in his book The Body<\/em>, \u201cNo other part of the body has received more misguided attention, or proved more resistant to scientific understanding, than the head.  The nineteenth century in particular was something of a golden age in this respect.\u201d
 
Believers in the discipline of physiognomy<\/em> claimed that you could tell someone\u2019s level of intelligence by measuring their lips, ears, or foreheads.  You could guess someone\u2019s future \u2013 and thus know whether they would make a good business partner, good friend, or good spouse \u2013 by examining the distance between their eyes. 
 
Captain FitzRoy believed there was such a thing as a \u201cnaturalist\u2019s nose.\u201d Charles Darwin apparently didn\u2019t have one. 
 
Dr. Barnard Davis (1801-1881), an English physician, became the world\u2019s supreme authority on the shape of the human skull.  His private collection numbered 1,540, which Bryson points out exceeded the total number of skulls in all the world\u2019s other institutional collections combined.  One has to wonder what trick-or-treaters might have thought when his door swung open on Halloween.   
 
Davis, like most of his peers, had decided in advance that the skulls of dark-skinned ethnicities would no doubt display \u201ccephalic peculiarities\u201d which indicated moral deficiencies.
 
Such people should be treated \u201cnot as criminals but as dangerous idiots.\u201d 
 
Here we should point out, with sadness and not a little anger, that most European doctors and scientists of that time were openly committed to the doctrine of their own racial superiority.  In the strange worlds of phrenology, craniometry, and physiognomy, it was easy enough to \u201cfind\u201d whatever data they needed to support their biases. 
 
A century and a half of genuine scientific research has toppled the notion that people who look different must therefore be different in character and intelligence. 
 
But old ideas die hard.  The odds are good that we\u2019ve all heard someone say, \u201cI knew just by looking at him that I couldn\u2019t trust him.\u201d
 
Perhaps we have said such words ourselves. 
 
The search for an infallible people-sorting mechanism \u2013 a way to tell the Good from the Bad from the Safe from the Threatening \u2013 has turned into something of a quest for the Relational Holy Grail.  Should we pay attention to skin color, noses, or bumps on the skull? 
 
It should come as no surprise that Jesus had something to say about this. 
 
Relational discernment doesn\u2019t come down to how people look.  And we can easily be fooled by what people say.  The true test of someone\u2019s character is what they do<\/em>.  \u201cA good tree bears good fruit, and a bad tree bears bad fruit,\u201d he declares at the end of his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:17).  
 
Here\u2019s how Eugene Peterson captures the wider context of that verse in his paraphrase called The Message<\/em>:   
 
\u201cBe wary of false preachers who smile a lot, dripping with practiced sincerity. Chances are they are out to rip you off some way or other. Don\u2019t be impressed with charisma; look for character. Who preachers are is the main thing, not what they say. A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook. These diseased trees with their bad apples are going to be chopped down and burned<\/em>\u201d (Matthew 7:15-20). 
 
In the tumult and chaos of our times \u2013 with every headline seeming to scream, \u201cYou should be wary and afraid of other people\u201d \u2013 how can we cultivate a healthy measure of trust?
 
Here are two measuring sticks for character. 
 
If someone speaks, do they tell the truth?  If someone makes a promise, do they actually keep it?
 
Those are signs of good fruit that can only come from a good tree.  We can increasingly entrust our hearts to such people. 
 
And if we ourselves make a practice of telling the truth and keeping our promises, others may just give their hearts to us, too. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here It was a strange interview. A young man, hoping to serve as the naturalist on the 1831 voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle as it surveyed the coastline of South America, sat before British Captain Robert FitzRoy. FitzRoy was impressed.  This candidate seemed both bright and congenial.  But something was wrong.  It was the young… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3107,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[531],"class_list":["post-3106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-judging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3109,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3106\/revisions\/3109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}