Thread: I'm sure we've all heard the idea that women can't be trusted with big decisions because women are emotional whereas men are rational/logical. This is irritating, I know. But I think we get so distracted by the sexism that we fail to notice a deeper faultline.

We often talk about emotion "clouding" our reasoning processes. If we could just eliminate those clouds of emotion, we would see our way clearly to the right path. But, as others today and yesterday have pointed out, this is actually not so.

Perhaps an analogy we could use is emotion being like our sense of taste. It's true that when we eat food that tastes good, we want to eat it again ... and again and again. Kids, left to their own devices would probably eat cake every day. That's not good for us.

But what if instead of trying to educate the child about nutrition and develop their taste for nutritious food, the parent ridiculed and made fun of the fact that taste factors into their consumption at all? What if they said, "Eat it, no matter how it tastes" ?

What would happen is that the child would learn to mistrust an important sense that has been given to them by God to distinguish between "this is good to eat" and "this is not." You'd give them rancid meat, & they'd choke it down because they were ashamed to admit it tasted bad.

This is in essence what happens with our reasoning when we don't allow emotion to play its proper part. God gave us emotional sensation for a reason. It wasn't a mistake. Our bad choices aren't His fault for making us emotional beings.