Saturday, June 8, 2013

Truth is the Perfect Lie

Another way to answer the "If you say you stopped believing in God you never really knew God" Catch-22 crap:

The fallacy in this argument is easily discovered once we realize that we say that we "know" things when the stories we tell ourselves about them are so convincing that we simply must act as if they are true (i.e. believe). The fact that one discovers an inconsistency in one's own beliefs that changes them does not make one's previous belief any less "real" or one's current belief necessarily so.

Our "realities" are in fact lies about the real world that are so perfect as to be indistinguishable from the truth.

Wisdom starts when we recognize this fact and see that the search for truth is really a process of interrogation where we try to discover the lie in what we tell ourselves about the world. If we love the truth we will be ruthless in our interrogation and will pursue difficult questions no matter how uncomfortable they may be.

Drawing Hands, M. C. Escher, 1948

Look at Escher's Drawing Hands; a hand, drawing a hand, drawing a hand. Faith provides us with an easy way out of an uncomfortable or inconvenient interrogation. It says, "The hand is real! Now, stop asking me questions!"

~SOS

1 comment:

  1. I feel like true believers have a hard time grasping anything that isn't absolute. They don't see a spectrum of morality, sexuality or belief--which fuels fallacies like this "no true scottsman."

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