The human memory is not all it's cracked up to be.
From the book, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin:
In study after study, people are not very good at re-creating a word-for-word account. They remember general content, but not specific wording. Several other studies also point to the imperfection of memory. Seemingly minor interventions can powerfully affect the accuracy of memory retrieval. An important series of studies was carried out by Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington, who was interested in the accuracy of witnesses' courtroom testimonies. Subjects were shown videotapes and asked leading questions about the content. If shown two cars that barely scraped each other, one group of subjects might be asked, "How fast were the cars going when they scraped each other?" and another group would be asked, "How fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?" Such one-word substitutions caused dramatic differences in the eyewitnesses' estimates of the speeds of the two vehicles. Then Loftus brought the subjects back, sometimes up to a week later, and asked, "How much broken glass did you see?" (There really was no broken glass.) The subjects who were asked the question with the word smashed in it were more likely to report "remembering" broken glass in the video. Their memory of what they actually saw had been reconstructed on the basis of a simple question the experimenter had asked a week earlier.
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This makes me think about how sly Satan was when he asked Eve, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?” Now, the answer is no...God did NOT say that, but it got Eve asking herself about what the Lord actually DID say and what did he actually mean and did she hear it correctly and the train of doubt has left the station.
Truth is...It's okay to question. It's okay to doubt. But to rely on our own recollections, experiences, or opinions instead of the never-changing word of God is traveling a road to ruin.
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