OK, so in this fight about is-a-God/ is-no-God, you may have noticed I'm not taking sides, not getting in that ring. I see both sides and I say what I see but I'm not lining up with anybody against anybody else. I like both sides; they both make good points. But I've got my own theory about truth. And like the rest of you, I've declared it to be a rule of the universe. And like the rest of you I can defend it pretty well.
So here's the rule: no one is more than 60% right and no one is more than 40% wrong. In religion? Yes. Also in politics, in relationships - marital relationships, non-marital relationships, sexual relationships, non-sexual relationships, parental relationships, sibling relationships, in friendships and enemy-ships. It's also true in fashion, finances, and any of those other things where we get all righteous about the "truth" of the situation.
The first thing this means is that no matter how certain I am of anything I believe, I'm no more than 60% right about it. And no matter how much I think you're completely wrong, you can't be completely wrong, only 40%.
The second thing this means is that I'll never know what part of what I believe or of what you believe is right and what part is wrong. And when we disagree it could be that it's part of my 60% right and your 40% wrong. Or it could be that it's part of your 60% right and my 40% wrong. Or it could be that we're both wrong.
Or it could be that we're both right. Most of what we each believe is a complex interconnected assortment of stuff that's gotten stuck together in our heads. Even the parts we try to work out logically (on the rare occasions when we actually go to the trouble to work anything out in any way, let alone logically) still have many tangled component parts that may or may not go together and that may or may not be strictly and absolutely true.
Like molecules in the body, our thoughts and ideas fit together like multidimensional puzzle pieces. We've put together the stuff we believe in configurations that fit the pieces together. But each of the ideas has other connection points into which still other ideas might fit. Even our disagreements might both be right - we just haven't worked out the interconnecting elements that fit it all together.
We can actually pull apart the different pieces of our thought systems and re-construct them with alternative idea-pieces and still come up with idea systems that hold together and also account for all the true stuff - but the overall picture has changed.
In point of fact, the natural state of the universe is not stability but volatility, turbulence, unsettled constant transformation. The one constant in ideas as well as in the physical world is that nothing stays the same, everything is always in a continual state of change and transition. It's just not natural for stuff to stay the same for very long at all. Rearranging our ideas is not only healthy and normal, it makes life so much more interesting.
The sooner we accept this basic foundational truth of the universe, the sooner we can live happily in our own lives and get along better with others in their lives as well.
In the next blog I address the question of whether things really are characterized by change or by stability.
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