The Upside of Bias

I consider myself to be a relatively intelligent person, relative being the operative word. There are those whom I consider to be more intelligent than I, and those who fall in the less, category. At least that is my own personal judgment. Be it right or wrong, it is my judgment to make.
I also consider myself quite capable of discerning truth from time to time. Again, there are those who are better and those who are not as good.
The truth is there are those in the world today who have tried to convince us all that personal judgment is a bad thing. They have tried to demonize personal judgment. The have even used the Bible to try and convince us that personal judgment is forbidden.
They often call it bias. Since when is bias a four-letter word? Webster defines bias as “a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment.” When you include the word sometimes in there, people just sort of flip out. They say “bias is an unreasoned judgment.” But, if sometimes the judgment is unreasoned, then it follows that sometimes it is actually reasoned. Yes folks, our personal judgments are OK when they are reasoned out.
The way I see it, there are times when we are unbiased and times when we are biased. First, to be unbiased you must know absolutely nothing about the subject for which you are making a judgment. Think about it, to be utterly and completely unbiased you either have to have no knowledge, experience, or feelings about a topic or you have chosen to totally ignore all prior information you have on the subject.
To judge when you go into the situation completely ignorant can work out fine assuming the person is presented the true facts and can reason all known information. But, let’s consider the person who ignores all previous information they have and they only judge based on the new details. Consider the following situation, you have to decide if you want your son to see a movie with his buddies. Your son has lied to you before and went with his girlfriend. The movie is rated R. To be totally unbiased and allow your child to go, you would have to ignore the fact that your child has lied and the fact that R-rated movies may contain some inappropriate material. This is not unbiased, it’s STUPID! You might call this person a Biblical fool, doing the wrong thing in spite of knowing the truth.
To sum this up, let’s consider the three situations where we are biased. First, you can be biased because you have extensive experience with the subject. If you have good information and Biblical truth, your biased judgment makes sense logically. The second situation would be if you have limited information, but are open to more information. This situation would be ok assuming you are getting accurate and Biblical information. This person is quite capable of making a reasoned judgment.
The final situation, as I see it, is when you have wrong information and are either unwilling to hear or don’t have access to the truth. This scenario will result in a negative outcome. This would be a case of unreasoned judgment. This person could be called foolish as well, but I would judge him as down right dangerous.