From the Editors September 10, 2012 Issue

In your corner

The Editors

Have you ever been out-argued even when you knew you were right?

Of course it’s normal to have differences of opinion with friends and family. But maybe you’ve had the experience of hearing someone say something that you knew was based on a misperception—such as a disproved rumor or an urban legend—without being able to convince the individual otherwise. Maybe this other person was a persuasive speaker, or maybe you just got flustered by the situation. It’s happened to many of us. And perhaps you wondered afterward, “Why, in the heat of the moment, couldn’t I find the right words, or the right ideas, to disprove a proposition I knew to be false?”

An experience like this offers a useful lesson in seeing how error, as the term is used in Christian Science, operates. Error is not a force in and of itself—that is to say, a mistake doesn’t have any self-generating or self-sustaining abilities—and has no intrinsic power to compel anyone to think or do anything. But it can be easy to forget what we know to be true about God and about ourselves as His reflection, when we’re facing challenges to our well-being such as sickness, or greed, or fear. Just as reasoned and careful arguments can seem to melt away in the heat of any argument, limiting claims and conditions can seem to gain the upper hand when we bump up against them.

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