I've been thinking about self-awareness.

I've been thinking a lot about self-awareness lately. It seems like the one thing that makes real objectivity possible. If you never question where your ideas come from, it's easy to just repeat what you've always heard, or what your group expects. For me, I started noticing this while praying. I'd have a thought and wonder, did this come from God, or did it come from my upbringing or the culture around me? The realization that my thoughts were programmed by my environment changed how I saw a lot of things.

People who don't look at their own programming can be vulnerable to being pulled into cults or extreme beliefs. If you don't know how you got your values, it's easy for someone else to swap them out without you even noticing.

I was raised Christian, so it's always strange to see people who call themselves Christian but don't seem to live by those values. Sometimes it feels like they never stop to ask if their actions match what they say they believe. I am frustrated by that gap.

And culture plays a huge part. If I'd grown up somewhere else, I might have had completely different beliefs.

But the self-aware me knows, it doesn't matter where I was raised, people in a healthy civilized society treat everyone else with respect.

Maybe the most important thing we can do is try to be more self-aware. Keep asking ourselves where our ideas come from, and if we're really living up to the values we claim to hold.