I don’t know why this happened to me, but for much of my life I have rebelled against any renunciation of the desire to know. It has gone against my grain to come up against any lazy refusal to want to know more. Something has mostly had to have a rational thread running through it before I could embrace a pattern of thought. I have not been able to be satisfied with dead-end conclusions.
So why did I get involved in a life that eschewed reason and relied on faith to explain the world. I now listen to words coming out of that church tradition and it seems like another planet. Worse, it sounds shallow and wimpy.
As I look back, I think I made it an intellectual game to create a construct that at least made internal sense. I remember learning church law and its details so I could run through the maze of the law with out being hurt. I made the parts work together, even if the parts were imaginary and the whole made no sense. It was like writing a novel and making all the parts make sense together, never mind if the story itself made sense.
I now realize how commonly this side road off the path of rationality has not just been unhelpful. It has set back the development of western civilization by thousands of years. People developed an intellectual malaise that allowed them to be satisfied with their own ignorance for thousands of years. Religion played a prominent role in the subjugation of intellectual advancement as it was, at the same time, complicit in keeping certain groups of people in power. The alliance between Church and State has been with us for centuries.
Long ago, the Greeks made great advances in pursuing an understanding of the world through observation and rational thought. There were those who found joy in the pursuit of knowledge, never being content with today’s answers. Ignorance was a springboard to discovery. They expressed a joy in rising from today’s unknown to better, but never complete knowledge.
Then the Romans came and disrupted the Greek culture. They were the engineers who built arenas for people to take delight in the death of gladiators. The works of the Greeks were also suppressed and hidden by new religion that preferred to solve mystery by faith and allegiance to doctrine. The middle east gave us three great religions, all relying on a combination of suppressed reason, ignorance and faith to explain the world.
We may be catching up with those Greeks in relying on reason to figure things out, only 2,500 years late. I am convinced that I can know, and that sometimes it is hard work. I reject the limp and feeble reliance on faith that may allow me to feel certain, but know it is not true.
I am pained by the satisfaction I see in the dim eyes of those who walk in ignorance, guided by faith. How will they ever have compassion for what they are unable, or unwilling to understand. I rebel against our social complacency with ignorance.