Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

[_Jersey Girl]

Saving my place here.

So, that's my own gloss. I think it's similar to accommodation and assimilation. Take those Covington's kids. Our brains took in various inputs in the form of watching videos, listening to talking heads on TV, and reading publications. Then our brains took all that information and turned it into a story about what happened. But it didn't do that just based on the sensory input. It did so using the schemata, which is why we came up with so many different stories amongst us.

[_Res Ipsa]

This is cool, Jersey Girl. I'm off to game, but I'll take this up again tomorrow.

[_Jersey Girl]

This is cool, Jersey Girl. I'm off to game, but I'll take this up again tomorrow.

I'll be dead from cabin fever by then.

[_Res Ipsa]

This is cool, Jersey Girl. I'm off to game, but I'll take this up again tomorrow.

I'll be dead from cabin fever by then.

Uh uh. No dying allowed.

[_Res Ipsa]

OK, I don't have anything to add to your last long post. I think I have the vocabulary and concepts down, so what should we tackle first?

[_Jersey Girl]

I'll be dead from cabin fever by then.

Uh uh. No dying allowed.

Good news! I didn't die!

Bad news! I polished off all the Valentine's candy!

[_Jersey Girl]

OK, I don't have anything to add to your last long post. I think I have the vocabulary and concepts down, so what should we tackle first?

I haven't had a lot of time to think about this.

I think...the first thing we do is admit that there will be no possible way to contain the dialogue. That said, I think it would be helpful to identify the various schema that went into our assessments of the Covington students incident.

Let me name a few schema in no particular order, I'm lying it'll be in some kind of order as it spills out of my head.

1. What does a Maga hat represent? What is a Trump supporter?
2. What does Trump represent?
3. What are Republicans?
4. What are Democrats?
5. What are the characteristics of white male high school students?
6. What are the characteristics of white male high school students in groups?
7. What do Native Americans represent?
8. What do the elderly represent?
9. What is a Black Israelite?
10. What are protestors? What happens at a protest?

Then you have to fully admit that every one of your definitions above relies on your education as well as your subjective life experience, and the stage of development that YOU are in because it influences how you evaluate what you experience in the world.

Then as you work your way through the list defining each schema, knowing that your education, subjective life experience, and your own particular stage of human development, justifies every schema within the schemata represented in the incident that you viewed you have to admit that your evaluation is at least somewhat reliant on your personally held bias.

:-D

Then as you begin to evaluate your schema, you find yourself blaming the press for frittering out the information in teeny tiny little bytes of information and torturing you until the information you've got is as complete as you can expect and it serves to 1) either served to confirm your bias or 2) served to disabuse you of your bias and therefore caused you to revise your assumptions which requires a level of self honesty that is difficult for us to achieve.

Then...you blame the chief players in the incident when they rework their stories to make themselves appear all noble and their stories compete with your confirmed biases or revised position, then you cast blame on yourself for being gullible enough to think that you could possibly know the actual truth and are suddenly overwhelmed with self disgust because you spent so much time thinking about something that is essentially unknowable, arguing on a message board over every minute detail and possible explanation with other folks who have gone through the same exact process as you have applying their own schema to the incident, and ruminate over how those kids are going to end up richer than God and you are not.

But in the end, you pat yourself on the back for being a good skeptic who questioned all of the above to start with because the value is in the questioning and the process. Yeah, that'll work so you can at least rescue a bit of self esteem. ;-)

Or you compartmentalized the whole damn thing, your schema is going to remain intact come hell or high water, and you refuse to let your position go under any circumstances so help you God, the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever is your individual persuasion up to and including various forms of animal worship possibly even performing certain rituals that involve an aluminum pole in the living room. Don't want to hear it no way no how. It was definitely the _____who was at fault.

And then you talk to some cabin fevered overly wordy Jersey Girl about why you didn't know what you couldn't have known about Mormonism after you read some book and wished you had it way back when so you didn't have to spend so much time smacking yourself upside your own head, doubting yourself after doubting the church, feeling guilty for not knowing what you couldn't have known, and she ends up telling you that you are only human like the rest of us are and we all fall for crap until we don't. But she'll still engage your thoughts anyway if it helps.

:-)

[_Jersey Girl]

Oh and if the kid who was engaged in a stare down had long hair, red hair, or no hair at all and looked like that kid who mocked you in middle school every freaking chance he got--then the kid in the stare down was definitely the instigator.

No question about it. Guilty as hell. Lock his cocky little ass up in Juvie. That'll teach him to screw with you!

[_Jersey Girl]

Don't mind me. I'm having a thread all to myself. Introverted only child's dream come true this is!

I wish this book had been around when I left Mormonism. I had a tough time dealing with the fact that I had been so wrong about something so important in my life.

I don't know how old you were when you left Mormonism but it's possible that the book might have been too much for you to process at the time OR it could have made all the difference in the world.

There are, for example, issues and shifts in my own life that were years in the making, years in the processing, and continue to evolve today as I take in more information, gain more experience as in just when you think you have a thing all whipped something or someone comes along and causes you to revise. Again.

Life is a journey, be present I say.

I can well understand a sense of betrayal, feeling like you were taken for a ride and beating yourself up because you didn't know it at the time.

I don't think it's so much about how wrong you were about Mormonism, more to the point it's about how right you believed you were. And if you were BIC, you barely stood a chance at seeing it from a different perspective because you were indoctrinated from basically the womb and I would almost bet my house (if I didn't need some place to sleep) that your journey out of Mormonism began in adulthood when you were more ready to evaluate the information before you.

All I really can say (not knowing the specifics) is that something made your antenna go up and it probably couldn't have happened any earlier than it did happen.

(Some of the things I've seen over time on these boards from certain posters whose ages I know, are completely consistent with their stage of development.)

How could you be so wrong about something so important? The same way the rest of us are, RI. If you are indoctrinated to a belief as a child, it's not even so much that you are wrong or right about a thing, it's what you accept that IS.

Mormonism was part of your schemata that represented the world to you as a child and it was likely reinforced time after time, year after year, by all of your experiences and by virtually everyone you knew, because the accepted premise was that Mormonism IS and what you assimilated and accommodated into your schema regarding Mormonism was taken from those reinforcers.

Until it wasn't.

[_Jersey Girl]

Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any post I've made on the thread thus far. I've been frozen in for almost 3 days and all the Valentine's candy is gone so back off.