Everyone here have opinions? I think I’m ready for a little trouble. Let me just put this here…
Politics. Morality. Religion. Science. Technology. The kids these days. The current state of humanity.
Toss that up on a social media site and see what happens, right? The best part is, you don’t even have to give your own opinion!
But that’s one of the things about opinions: you want to voice your own. If we find something we don’t have an opinion on, we form an opinion. Some people quickly snap to an opinion without thought, and some people spend time and study to form an opinion. But they still each have an opinion. Even if no one cares, we all feel the need to give our opinion, or to at least have one. Why?
Part of it might just be part of the hard-wiring God gave us. If we know something is right, we want others to know so that they don’t make a mistake. We want others to know the truth. But because we are corrupted, usually all we really want is to be right and to be better than everybody else, regardless of how correct our opinions may or may not be.
Another part might be our need to exercise our free will, to know and to feel that we are autonomous. We can have our own thoughts and make our own decisions. God gave us that, too. But once again, while our hard-wiring is intact, our programming is corrupted.
So how do you know if someone has a stupid opinion? How do you know if you have a stupid opinion? Everyone has an opinion on everything! With so many opinions, we can’t all be right. There must be a standard. There must be something you can measure all opinions by so you can know if they are right.
Guess what? There is. And yes, I’m setting you up. You’ve probably guessed the answer already.
God is ultimate good, and He created everything. God has set the measure and the standard. How do you know what God has to say about something? He wrote a book called the Holy Bible. Read it and you will know what opinions you should and should not have. You will find things that you have gotten wrong. You may be highly and strongly opinionated about these things, but wrong is wrong. You’ll have to learn what is right and form a new opinion. It’s hard, but it is necessary. You can’t go on believing something wrong.
So now that you have the right opinion, you want to start telling everyone you know about it! Be careful how you do that. No one likes being talked down to from a high horse. Also be aware that if you have learned the right things, these are God’s words, not yours. Yes, you still have opinions, but you’re a messenger as well.
But what if I have the right opinion and relate the message in the most respectful manner, and someone still thinks I’m wrong and that I have a stupid opinion?
That’s another thing about opinions: not everyone shares it with you. You can be right, but as long as someone else has their own opinion, your opinion is just that – an opinion. People who agree with each other think that they are right, whether or not they are. This is why you need to be careful when forming opinions. This is why you can have a wrong opinion until you find out otherwise. This is part of why so many people think that everyone else has a stupid opinion.
Everyone has an opinion about everything. Everyone wants to tell everyone else their own opinion. Not everyone shares the same opinion. Until someone sees what is correct, anyone who doesn’t agree with them has a stupid opinion. You can’t change someone else’s opinion. But you can change your own opinion.