An Open Invitation From The Blendeds

[aron]

I wanted to post and open invitation from one of the leading figures in the local churches. I don't know who the current "blendeds" are, beyond Ron Kangas and Ed Marks. But one person has been quite active in supporting LSM initiatives** and is therefore on my list of "blendeds" leading the assemblies affiliated with Witness Lee. He also has a high profile public personality, and has funded several University schools that have subsequently been named after family members.

His name is Gerald Chan, and I recently came across several of his speeches in which he openly encourages people to read widely from divergent sources, to formulate unique ideas and to discuss them publicly, even with others who may not understand them, or agree.

So I ask here, has anyone heard him say something like this in meetings of the local churches? Or does he say, "No, that's just for unbelievers in public health. Here, we don't think" or some such? And if this is so, how can anyone sustainably hold two completely contradictory positions?

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/fe...-remarks-chan/

Here's his Harvard 2012 Commencement Speech, in part:

"Commencement is a rite of passage whereby the new graduates are inducted into the company of the learned. In your honoring me by inviting me to be with you today, I suppose I am expected to offer some words of wisdom as part of this rite of passage. Being one who had studied in this school and then gone on to do different things, I also sense there is an expectation that I would draw on my diverse life experiences in formulating my comments. I will attempt to do so by gathering my thoughts around three themes—idea, public and health—which, as a play on words, became the title of my speech today.

First, let me talk about idea. In times past when the discovery of new knowledge was slow and the dissemination of knowledge constricted, a learned person was one who had acquired and possessed knowledge... Times have changed. New knowledge is now being produced at a breakneck speed and is readily accessible to anyone with connection to the Internet. A learned person can no longer be defined merely as one who is in possession of knowledge, or perhaps more accurately, and somewhat derogatorily, one who is in possession of information. Today, whether a person can be considered a learned person hinges on what he does with the knowledge he has. A beautiful mind is not beautiful by virtue of its storage capacity, nor even what has been stored in it. A beautiful mind is a mind with beautiful ideas.

By an idea, I do not mean a thought which unexpectedly pops into your consciousness like the four year old in a play group who exclaims, “Hey guys, I have an idea!” By an idea, I mean the conceptualization of a matter which results from a conscious examination of it...

I talk about ideas because I see in the communications of today’s society, be they among individuals or the masses, an impoverishment of ideas. Politicians are known by their sound bites. Messages with 140 characters or less encourage the communication of the trivial. Tweets are great for knowing where your friends are having dinner tonight, but they are not conducive to the generation nor the communication of ideas. If modern communication technology has dumbed down society, it is in its proliferating communications which have no relevance to enriching the pool of ideas found in society. Being flooded with minutiae of everyday life subverts our intellectual life by luring us into, and holding us captive in the present, in what is, such that we have no time and no energy left to consider what might be, or what can be, or what should be. The peril we face in today’s society [read, local church] is that we unwittingly become mere pragmatists, and soon, exhausted realists.

I may be condemned here for being idealistic. Rightly so. History shows us that ideas are indeed aspirational. In the idea that all men are created equal is the aspiration that all men may be able to live as equals. It is in this gap between what should be and what is that there is a potential energy which, when harnessed, can be converted into kinetic energy to power action. In other words, ideas empower action. A person devoid of ideas will have neither ideals to work towards nor the energy to do so.

My first advice to you, graduates, is to enrich your lives with ideas, even big ideas. Read, reflect, and ruminate (the new three Rs). Observe and deduce, postulate and verify, look for connections. Be curious, be open-minded, reframe problems rather than just looking for answers, have the courage to differ from conventional wisdom, do not dismiss your intuition. Discuss, debate and discourse with others. Look into history, watch current affairs; study the sacred texts, observe humanity. These are the mental habits conducive to the spontaneous generation of ideas. A life is rich when it is rich with ideas."

**his non-profit Morningside Foundation gave over half a million dollars to CRI to fund the "We were wrong" issue.