The challenge of being an individual with integrity is not only living up to what we say we believe. That's hard enough but another deeply challenging aspect of this is that we're not always aware of what it means to live up to what we say we believe.
The more complex our understanding of life becomes, the more work is required to really explore the philosophical implications of what we've seen to be true, to whatever extent that might be. I can have a profound spiritual experience (like the one I experienced two weeks ago) and believe that it was an experience of truth and yet remain relatively unchanged if I'm unwilling to do the difficult work of using my intellectual capacity - to the best of my ability - to really look into the implications of what I experienced.
Even this recognition does not make this journey a neat and tidy one. Two people can have a very similar experience and come to very different conclusions regarding what it means about how they live their lives. Perhaps newborn infants have a clean slate but we definitely do not. We enter every experience with our preconditioned thoughts and ideas, with our own unique temperament and with our own psychological, emotional, intellectual and physical characteristics. All we can do is work with what we've got, though we can certainly make the effort to develop what we've got, too.
Nevertheless, we are all making inferences about our experiences already, even if they're not very logical and reasonable inferences. If I'm in a hurry to get to work and I hit a red light it may very well be easy to think, "Why does God want me to be late?!? What did I do wrong?" If I believe that God is in control of every detail surrounding all of existence then such an interpretation would make sense. And this is what people have predominantly believed at a certain stage of human development throughout history. It's 'reasonable' but only from a particular point of view, one which most of us no longer view as very reasonable at all.
As a result of this traffic transgression, I might search my heart and soul to find my unconfessed sin or, failing that, I might promise God my allegiance for his mercy in getting me to work on time. I can honestly say I have attempted such negotiations. Again, reasonable actions if I have a particular belief system and understanding but totally ridiculous outside of that.
How many people have tried to make deals with God to avoid some immense difficulty or tragedy, even though they may have previously scoffed at the very notion of a Divine Intervener? Perhaps they weren't really sure whether or not God exists but what would it really mean to live as though one didn't know whether God exists? What would be the philosophical implications of such uncertainty?
It would appear that many of us are willing (to some degree) to essentially drop some of our beliefs and pick up others when it's most convenient. This seems a bit selfish, narcissistic and relativistic, does it not? But it's not all bad because being 'certain' about things we can't really be certain about can be a dangerous game. So says post-modernism. And it's a reasonable caution. The 20th century is a testimony to this.
In my view, the problem isn't found in remaining uncertain - open to new ideas and revelation - the problem is that many of us can appreciate this ideal but we still pick and choose things we want to be certain about without really going through the philosophical gauntlet of critical thinking that allows us to use as much information as possible to arrive at the most informed conclusions we possibly can, even if they're not absolute. We want to be able to choose what to be certain about and what not to be certain about, to just take the best of both worlds.
We want to have our cake and eat it too.
Unfortunately, once you open this can of worms, you have to keep going all the way or you end up in some kind of nebulous philosophical limbo. Not a fun place. It takes a lot of courage to walk through the uncertainty that emerges when we come to see that absolute truth claims are not absolutely true simply because they are claimed to be so. "Is anything absolutely true?" we wonder. That's not a comfortable question.
So how do we come to know what is true or if such things are possible? I meant to write about this before and never got to it. I'm glad I ended up at this point, however that happened. I shall explore this important question more fully next time...
The more complex our understanding of life becomes, the more work is required to really explore the philosophical implications of what we've seen to be true, to whatever extent that might be. I can have a profound spiritual experience (like the one I experienced two weeks ago) and believe that it was an experience of truth and yet remain relatively unchanged if I'm unwilling to do the difficult work of using my intellectual capacity - to the best of my ability - to really look into the implications of what I experienced.
Even this recognition does not make this journey a neat and tidy one. Two people can have a very similar experience and come to very different conclusions regarding what it means about how they live their lives. Perhaps newborn infants have a clean slate but we definitely do not. We enter every experience with our preconditioned thoughts and ideas, with our own unique temperament and with our own psychological, emotional, intellectual and physical characteristics. All we can do is work with what we've got, though we can certainly make the effort to develop what we've got, too.
Nevertheless, we are all making inferences about our experiences already, even if they're not very logical and reasonable inferences. If I'm in a hurry to get to work and I hit a red light it may very well be easy to think, "Why does God want me to be late?!? What did I do wrong?" If I believe that God is in control of every detail surrounding all of existence then such an interpretation would make sense. And this is what people have predominantly believed at a certain stage of human development throughout history. It's 'reasonable' but only from a particular point of view, one which most of us no longer view as very reasonable at all.
As a result of this traffic transgression, I might search my heart and soul to find my unconfessed sin or, failing that, I might promise God my allegiance for his mercy in getting me to work on time. I can honestly say I have attempted such negotiations. Again, reasonable actions if I have a particular belief system and understanding but totally ridiculous outside of that.
How many people have tried to make deals with God to avoid some immense difficulty or tragedy, even though they may have previously scoffed at the very notion of a Divine Intervener? Perhaps they weren't really sure whether or not God exists but what would it really mean to live as though one didn't know whether God exists? What would be the philosophical implications of such uncertainty?
It would appear that many of us are willing (to some degree) to essentially drop some of our beliefs and pick up others when it's most convenient. This seems a bit selfish, narcissistic and relativistic, does it not? But it's not all bad because being 'certain' about things we can't really be certain about can be a dangerous game. So says post-modernism. And it's a reasonable caution. The 20th century is a testimony to this.
In my view, the problem isn't found in remaining uncertain - open to new ideas and revelation - the problem is that many of us can appreciate this ideal but we still pick and choose things we want to be certain about without really going through the philosophical gauntlet of critical thinking that allows us to use as much information as possible to arrive at the most informed conclusions we possibly can, even if they're not absolute. We want to be able to choose what to be certain about and what not to be certain about, to just take the best of both worlds.
We want to have our cake and eat it too.
Unfortunately, once you open this can of worms, you have to keep going all the way or you end up in some kind of nebulous philosophical limbo. Not a fun place. It takes a lot of courage to walk through the uncertainty that emerges when we come to see that absolute truth claims are not absolutely true simply because they are claimed to be so. "Is anything absolutely true?" we wonder. That's not a comfortable question.
So how do we come to know what is true or if such things are possible? I meant to write about this before and never got to it. I'm glad I ended up at this point, however that happened. I shall explore this important question more fully next time...
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