I take my religion seriously. In fact, I don't seem much of a difference between my religion and my life--in everything I do I need to make moral decisions, I need to live a Christ-centered life. I feel obligated to "[be] honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and [to do] good to my fellow men" (AF 13). I also feel obligated to seek after righteousness for righteousness' sake, and to bring dark dealings to light--I suppose that that is a fancy way of saying that I feel it necessary, at times, to make people aware of actions and decisions that can lead to evil. My voice will not remain silent as I watch other people tear down the good in the world.
This Christmas season, I want to focus more on the the story of the Truth and the Light of this world: Jesus Christ. I do not want to be like the many hotel owners who did not have room for Him in their inns because they were too preoccupied with appeasing the majority of people. It is sad to think that because they were busy with the hundreds of other, unimportant patrons, that they missed out on the best thing since their escape from Egyptian bondage.
I was asked recently what I thought was the most "evil" thing our society (I suppose they meant the one that she and I are a part of) is facing. I didn't necessarily have an answer--I often do not have answers right at the time that people want to know them. But I have an answer now:
--- (if you don't care for reading my lead-in, skip down to the next set of dashes) ---
The most 'evil' thing threatening our society is that there are so few people who have the truth, and even fewer who know how to find it. Most people in my age range (18-30) are completely ignorant on how to determine truth, they assume that the majority opinion is the true course, and they believe that they cannot go wrong if most people believe the way that they do. My friends, that is a very sophist way of thinking. Sophists do not follow the truth, they justify their own behavior, whether it is founded on absolute truth or not.
Sophist Story:
Around the great Greek rhetorician Aristotle's time, there was a philosophical debate over what constituted truth and how one could come to know the truth. One one side of the argument there was Aristotle and his pupils, and on the other were the sophists. Sophists argued that truth was whatever people believed it was: that if the majority of people agreed to it, then it simply must be true. They argued that that was the only way in which we as humans could know the truth; by devising some method to tally the number of people on each side of an argument and calculating which side had the most votes. Aristotle, having thought more deeply about the matter realized a flaw in such thinking, and it can be illustrated by a mock court case (since the judicial system was where it was necessary to discover truth) :
Tyros purchases a cow with a star pattern on its belly from a far away village, it is late when he gets home and so he lets it out to pasture for the night.
Pyrinthia, a thief, catches the cow at night and ties it up at his house.
The next day, Printhia tells his neighbors that he just bought a cow and he shows it off to them.
Tyros searches for his cow and discovers it at Pyrinthia's house. He serves Pyrinthia, suing him for the theft of his cow.
In the court case, Pyrinthia calls all of his neighbors as witnesses. They affirm that Pyrinthia purchased the cow and that they saw it at his house.
Tyros argues that he took it from him the night of the purchase, but since no one saw him with it, Pyrinthia claimed that "maybe Tyros dreamed that he bought my cow". The crowd laughed and the judge called for a vote. Since the majority of people sided with Pyrinthia, the judged declared Pyrinthia in the right.
According to the sophist way of reckoning, the truth was that Pyrinthia was right because everyone seemed to believe his side of the story. But the real truth is that Tyros purchased the cow and Pyrinthia stole it...
Aristotle claimed that there is an eternal truth--what actually happened. How do we determine that though? Tyros could call, as a witness, the seller of the cow, who could testify in his behalf. But what if the cow salesman is blind and could not describe the man who purchased the cow? How do we determine the truth?
The reason why sophistry is so popular is because it's so easy. Truth was never easy. Our entire global society, from the early ages of man up until now, has followed the sophist view of truth--because there is a simple method for measuring it. We have modified our methods of course: some peoples' votes count more than others, but overall it is the majority who control truth. An environmental scientist who has been conducting research for 50 years has more weight in environmental matters than the hundred people who call him a farce and yet have never done any research in their life. But the sophist way of thought still applies: if the majority of people believe something is true, then it is true.
Aristotle claimed that the only way to come to the truth is to debate it, to present all sides of the argument and to present all of the facts that each side sees as important, and then to use those facts and points to prove the fallacies of the other arguments. In order for this to work, realistically, each side would need to be persuadable--they would need to leave themselves open enough to realize the flaws in their thinking. To Aristotle, the truth is not something that we, as a society, can come to all at once--it is an individual path, something that we must all take. It is not something that we can merely trust one individual on. To realize the truth we need to experience both sides of the argument. --This sounds a lot like the principle of Agency, "in order to make a decision with full agency, we need to know what both sides of our decision are like," we need to have knowledge that is founded on experience. Aristotle was on to something very deep and very great.
Unfortunately, Aristotle's argument is like a voice of the past--people in the modern times care very little for age old voices, they always want "new" and "better." The Truth never gets old however, but like many foods, it gets better with time.
My friends, if Christ is symbolic of the truth, because he possessed the truth, then the story of the Savior's birth takes on a new meaning. All of the many inns, who housed many people, much like a sophist might persuade many people to agree with them, missed their shot at the truth--not knowingly, but unknowingly. They missed their shot at the truth because they did not leave sufficient room in their inn to be wrong. Not only did they fail to house the Savior of the world, they failed to house the direct blood lineage of David--if they had had a king, Jesus would have been it. But the innkeepers, for whatever reason, did not leave any spare rooms.
--- ---
My point is, there are many cultural tendencies, particularly over the last couple years, that distract us from seeing the truth. We are more concerned about how many people like our stupid Youtube videos than we are about figuring it out for ourselves. We are more concerned with rallying and holding sit-ins than we are about discovering the truth. We are more concerned with watching prime-time, reality television than we are about experiencing the world for ourselves. We are more concerned with posting our status on Facebook and twitter and reading others' posts than we are about visiting with our friends and family in person.
If you want to know the truth, you literally have to seek it out: you have to investigate all sides (it might surprise you, but there are at least two sides to everything you hear or see).
The trickiest thing that Satan has done is convince people that the truth is easy to find and that lots of people have the truth. He has made it appear as though everyone else knows what they are doing, when really, very few people know what they are doing--in general, or in life. Few people possess the truth, and they only possess the truth because they have devoted a lot of time to discovering it.
No comments:
Post a Comment