Swallowing With Open Eyes

How are we to figure out what is real in this life?  What is authentic?  What is trustworthy?  It's hard enough already but when we bring faith into the picture then it suddenly gets all the more difficult.  How many religions are there in this world to choose from?  This list seems almost endless.  And they all claim to have the truth.

Well, at the risk of seeming intolerant and insensitive, somebody's wrong!  And others would insist that everyone's wrong.  At least it would seem so when it comes to finding answers.

Someone way back in the day must have decided to try to make sense of this life ... perhaps ostensibly to even help his fellow man make sense of this life.  Maybe he was trying to be helpful.  He may not have had all the pieces or all the answers and there were still blanks that needed to be filled in so he just filled them in wherever needed.  After a while what was true and what was just "filler" became indistinguishable and both became equally "sacred" and "true." And it helped people cope.  Life is difficult enough as it is and its almost impossible when nothing makes sense.

We create our own versions of truth.  Perhaps we do so by accident but what if there is something more sinister going on?  Call me jaded, but someone at the very beginning of a religion has to know that he is just making stuff up.  I know that virtually all religions are filled with sincere people and in each religion there had to be that first genuine convert.  But the guy just before him ... he knew!  He knew it wasn't all real.  At best he had to know that it was a hopeful guess.

I remember learning back in my college days [I was a reluctant biology major after all] that frogs cannot swallow with their eyes open.  Sadly, I find that many of the people I run into have a lot in common with frogs.  This is especially true in the nutritional supplement world and Christians seem especially gullible in this regard ... but I digress.  There is a lot of stuff out there in the faith department that we would have to have our eyes closed to swallow ... but this extends beyond the typical boundaries of "faith" to include such things as global warming, evolution, and the other stretches of science where it has become almost a religion unto itself.  Me -- I would rather swallow with my eyes wide open.

So maybe the guys who invented their religions were sincere and perhaps delusional ... L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind.  Now that is so much more comforting.  To their credit, though, perhaps they knew that everyone was on a search for meaning.  Or maybe they were just sinister people and created belief systems to control people.  Or maybe they were just reacting against a greater falsehood, a greater deception.  Maybe that is what motivated people like Buddha, Confucius, Gandhi, and even Nietzsche.

Perhaps they were just sick and tired of watching people being manipulated by the prevailing false view of reality.  As a reaction to it, they ended up creating a new way of thinking, a new way of believing, a new way of living.  The truth of the matter is that Col. Nathan R. Jessup [played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men] was exactly wrong.  It is not so much that we can't handle the truth but that we can't live without it.