By Doug Bing, Washington Conference president
I learned a new word today: ultracrepidarianism. Want to take a guess what that means? There are some who may even look at the word and think they know what it means, then go and try to explain the word and be totally wrong. That would, in fact, be ultracrepidarianism.
The meaning of the word is the act or habit of giving opinions or advice on something outside the scope of one’s knowledge. The English word was coined in 1819 by William Hazlitt, who used the term to mock his contemporaries who would speak confidently on topics they did not understand.
Today, it seems that we can see this ultracrepidarianism all over the place.
We certainly see it on social media, where people post or repost things that, frankly, they know nothing about. They post with such confidence and believe it as if it were true. Others may have the problem of believing someone who is an ultracrepidarian. We see it on social media and it sounds good, so we believe it, only to find that the person who posted it had no idea what they were talking about.
Frankly, this can come into religious circles. It can creep into religious organizations. Ideas are stated that may even sound biblical. Upon further review, they are not in the Bible at all. Or statements can be made about religious organizations that could be salacious but sound like they could possibly be true, and the next thing you know, they are all over the place. The only thing is, there may not be a shred of truth there at all.
In the Bible, there was a group of people called fair-minded in Acts 17:11. “These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” They were fair-minded in that they listened to what was being said and then went to check it out for themselves. They wanted to be able to talk about things that they knew about for themselves.
In our world today, we can speak about things or pass things along that we know nothing about, or instead, we can check it out before we speak or pass along information. Let’s eradicate ultracrepidarianism from our lives and speak only the things of God and His love that we have experienced for ourselves.