Opener

While talking to a friend named M last night I realized that I have a lot of very sticky, controversial viewpoints that I wish people understood at the same level as I do.

For starters, I'm a Utilitarian: I believe that ethical choices are based on whether or not the outcome produces more good for more people than it causes harm. I'm also a conservationist: I believe that the environment is there for us to use and we should use it responsibly, including replenishing it when possible and hopefully reach a point where it is self sustaining. I'm also an Optimist: I feel like there is enough good in the world that eventually things will turn out better on their own and occasionally it just takes time for that to happen.

Those three things constituted the argument that M and I had last night.

I'm a self-proclaimed Rhetorician: I seek for common consent in all of my views and actions and use the skills that I know pertaining to communication in order to convince people to agree with the things I believe in. However, a good rhetorician is one that is never settled completely on one viewpoint, so I also believe that everything I know about life is subject to what I can be ethically persuaded to believe at the time. In the future, I may not hold the views that I do today merely because someone has come along and was able to persuade me to see the picture from a different angle that makes more sense.
Simply put, I believe the things I believe because of the experiences I've had, the people I've encountered, and the persuasion that I have been put under.--I get it from school, church, the media, you name it, but I get it responsibly. I'm not easily persuaded, so it takes a pretty strong argument for me to change my opinions. But, like I said: I'm always open to changing them because it means that I have found a little greater truth.

All of that said, I'm starting up this blog to have a place to write about these things I encounter--the arguments that people make to me and why I agree or disagree with them.

The title of the blog actually spins off of a few things, particularly one truth I am coming to know more and more as time goes on: everything we "know" about life is not 100% provable. There is no "proof" out there that is so solid that it is readily accepted.-- Outside of the truth that is manifested by the Holy Spirit (I can get to why that is later), I can only think of one thing that comes close: Gravity.
Nearly everyone believes that when you drop something, it will always drop (on earth) due to gravity. However, the only reason we know this is because of demonstrative data, or data that we can see: we've seen things fall so many times that we know that they'll do it. --try putting us in outer space: do they fall? No...well, yes, they're constantly falling (as far as we know anyway...I've never been there and seen it, so the level in which I believe that is limited to the ethos of astronauts who have been there and the science teacher who told me so--I've never felt what it's like).
So my point is, nothing is completely provable and the only reason why we believe what we do is because we are persuaded to believe that way based on the empirical evidence, ethos of others, and philosophical evidence. In other words, we either sense it with one of the 5 senses, we believe it because of the source it comes from, or we are persuaded to believe it based on various philosophical tools that orators use.

What I truth and knowledge if not what we as mankind make it out to be?



Along with all of that, I am a firm believer in God, I am a Mormon or Latter-day saint, and I don't merely "believe" in my religion, I know it is true based on something more than philosophy, other people, or empirical evidence.