Logical doodles

The craze in recent years has been to put things into “doodles”, creative cartoonish drawings that supposedly support a lecture or presentation. It’s a very fickle thing though, because if the doodles get shared without the context, chaos can ensue, as I discovered at work.  But, there are always positives!

I can’t tell you how many times I made fun of the doodles, because it felt like they were trying too hard to be modern.  But the doodles accompanied corporate speak, which is made fun of by the beloved Weird Al.  I would play this video on repeat.

And the biggest takeaway is… Synergy!!!

And the majority of doodles like that have the same effect.  I ended up wondering what the heck my bosses were trying to say because the cartoons focused on words that didn’t make sense in the context.  E Tufte I think is the name who gave phenomenal insights on successful presentations.  Not your standard death by PowerPoint, or gimmicks.

Which leads me to this weird experience I had this week.  I was recommended to watch a video of doodles, drawn at the pace of the presentation.  This necessitated the artist to draw separately from the audio, and it was sped up to match.  But I found I understood the whole thing better.  If you take the doodles out of that context, they again make no sense.  This merged the dominant visual sense that humans have with the audio and was quite striking to me!

Of course, the topic has to be interesting as well.  The providence of the recommendation was the non fiction works and radio broadcasts of one of the finest men of letters, philosopher, and theologian, C.S. Lewis.  Who is he, you ask?  As if you didn’t know!

Lewis lived in the early twentieth century, fought and was wounded in WWI, and was a very good friend of Tolkien.  He was an atheist, but in his thirties, he became a Christian.  His radio broadcasts during WWII about Christianity were well known.  Lewis didn’t take a spiritual road to Christianity, but a logical one.  He was able to take reason and think his way there, and then he left instructions for others to follow!  Works that people like Dawkins either have not read or have rejected outright, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles, all are skeptical discussions of human morality, religion, and the logical conclusions he drew from them.  Lewis is also a huge proponent of the “Lord, liar, lunatic” dilemma.  In it, he takes the assertions of Jesus that he was God and puts it to the test.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Apparently, some Christian theologians disagree if Jesus claimed to be God.  Which is stupid, because they are Christian, and they would not be Christian if they didn’t believe Jesus was God.  You can’t fix stupid, folks.

Anyway, while watching these doodle videos I found myself understanding them a lot better than if I had just read them or listened to them or tried to decipher the doodles after the fact.  I think that is a great way to learn, visually and audibly.  The human brain works best that way.

I was so struck by these that I felt like sharing them with all of Reader-land!  In a time when common sense is so uncommon, it’s a freaking superpower, someone carefully and articulately thinking out questions that are constantly being misconstrued or ignored is a breath of fresh air.  And he lived through the horrors of last century, he wasn’t mollycoddled like today’s society.  Yes, especially me.

So go check out CSLewisDoodle, challenge your brain to think about something beyond sports or politics.  I probably will write something about the Priggery video, because we all need a refresher on Christian charity!

I leave you with the doodle that contains the quote above.  It’s at the end, and you won’t regret the journey there!