PLEASE DON'T LET YOUR IMAGINATION BECOME YOUR REALITY

Blog number 521  *******   12 June 2011


In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, I must confess that this Blog entry was not originally intended to be a Blog entry. No indeed. What happened was that I was reading the letters page of "The Humanist" magazine and I came across a letter from one David C. Mark declaring, "...I determined God doesn't exist..." 

My immediate gut response was, "And you determined this how?" 

My second gut response was to write a letter to the letters editor of The Humanist. But I know there is no way this letter would be published in that letters page or any other letters page in any part of the country and parts of Asia. This Blog entry, then is that letter. I didn't want to waste all that writing. Confession over.

If David C. Mark had determined that God does exist, I would give the same response. I am an equal opportunity letter writer answerer. Besides, how can anyone possibly know what cannot be known?

And besides all that, none of us has the same mental "picture" of God. So there's that. 

My real problem with this is, how are we as a species ever going to get it together if we keep insisting that our theories, our opinions, our guesses are just as real, just as true, just as pertinent as facts? 

 Opinions and theories are what people put together because they think this is the same thing as knowing.  They don't realize, because nobody ever told them, that you can know nothing unless you know facts.  Not realizing this, many people - I would say most people, make up a theory, an opinion, a guess about how something operates and then argue with others about their guesses.  What we call science these days is almost universally of this caliber. 

 Technicians we have in abundance.  Scientists?  Pretty rare.   In fact, so rare that we usually call our technicians, "scientists."  Probably so that we will have some, like we had back in the old days.

 We don't have to guess about what IS, about what exists. About existence.  The facts are there.  They aren't hidden anywhere like an Aladdin's treasure cave.  My God, the facts are all around us constantly.  In abundance.  A plethora of facts?  Well, yeah.

Why can't we see these facts?  Because when we were very young, our parents gave us our facts about what IS.  As we grew older, our teachers gave us our facts.  As we grew still older, we began to get our facts from those we considered authorities, never realizing that all these people got the facts they were imparting to us from their parents, their teachers, their authorities. 

Since we already had all the facts, why look for them?  Waste of time, yeah?  And since we don't look for them we never see them. The purloined letter ad infinitum.

Nobody ever checked these facts that were given to them.  Nobody was ever taught that it was necessary to check them, nor was anyone ever taught how to check those facts.  I don't mean checking facts by asking other people, but by checking them from direct experience of what IS, which is staring us right in the face 24/7.

The first time we were told that light reflected from an object hit the retina, traveled up the optic nerve and into the brain and THEN we saw the object and not before, that should have triggered a mind boggling realization.  But it didn't.  We just accepted it as a truth and went on.  Didn't we?