Faith + Reason = Truth

The Abbasids, a branch of Islam whose Imam was descended in a line from an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, overthrew the ruling Umayyad line of caliphs who ruled from Damascus around the year 750.  Baghdad became the seat of power for the Abbasids when they took control of the Dar al-Islam ("House of Islam," or the lands ruled by the caliphate).  When the Abbasids entered Damascus and the royal palace there, a terrible slaughter ensued, with all who fled being chased by horsemen and cut down as they ran.

The various divisions within Islam were, and still are, frequently as brutal towards other branches of Islam as they were to other religions.  The same can be said of Christianity.  It can also be said that these two religions, Christianity and Islam, more than any others, have employed the sword to spread their beliefs to those who did not previously share them.  But I believe that fact is more of a testament to the time that these religions took root and the state of humanity at that time than anything that can be attributed to the compassionate belief systems that the religions intended to promote.  Although I believe Christ was the Son of God and the Son of Man, who never led any battles or killed another person or sought the death of anyone at any place or any time, whereas Muhammad was a military leader who directed the slaughter of thousands in battle and enjoyed the fruits of that astonishing string of victories, I also know that many (not all) of the teachings of Islam and of Christianity are virtually identical in spirit and in practice.  Muhammad was directly responsible for transmitting the words of the Qu'ran to humanity, whether the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) delivered them straight from God (Allah) or not, and for that, at that brutal period of mankind's brutal history, the world owes much thanks.

At various times in the histories of each religion, it was acceptable to proclaim one's belief and be okay with the fact that your neighbor held a different one (even though you felt bad for him and the future of his soul).  It is mostly that way today.   For this I am grateful, and more than that, I am hopeful.

There is a phrase that has been attributed to various religious combatants in the moments before merciless slaughter of men, women, and children was to ensue, with the English translation of the original languages going along the lines of "kill them all; God [or Allah, or the Lord, etc] will recognize his own."  The earliest instance of that sentiment that I have come across has been pinned on my own Catholic Church, at the time of the Cathar heresy.  The Cathars were a group in an area of south/southeastern France, Languedoc, that were a thorn in the side of the Church around the year 1200.   Theirs was a sort of resurrection of early beliefs, before official Orthodoxy (literally "right thinking," as opposed to heterodoxy or "different thinking") had been established in the first few centuries after the death and Resurrection of Christ, that Christ was actually of two natures:  one divine, and one human.  The version of Christianity that won out, however, was that Christ was both human and divine at the same time, rather than one at a time.

One of the main reasons that this group was allowed to exist within Catholic communities (remember that this is hundreds of years before the Protestant Reformation, but even the Reformation did not subscribe to this heresy) and why its membership took off at such an alarming rate was that the Cathars actually exemplified what Christians were "supposed" to be, as opposed to the frequently corrupt and wrong-living clergy and Church holy men of the time.  Townspeople were rapidly converting to Catharism, believing that they must in fact be the REAL heirs to Christ's teachings and ways, since they were the ones walking the walk, and the Church was having none of it.

So Pope Innocent III (great name) has this great idea to realize the benefits of a "Crusade," i.e. keeping noblemen and fighting busy while promising them land and other spoils of victory, while accomplishing the goal of stamping out this heresy once and for all.  At the city of Beziers, on July 22, 1209, surrounded by a Catholic army of the Pope, the mostly Catholic citizenry refused to turn over their Cathar friends, who were but a small minority in the town, for fear of what the army would do to them (burn them all at the stake as heretics).  Upon this refusal, the army entered the town with the order to slaughter the heretics.  When the question was raised "how will we know Catholic from Cathar?" the reply came to "kill them all, for God will recognize his own."

Over 10,000 and possibly upwards of 20,000 men, women, and children were put to the sword, and the town was burned to the ground.  The "crusade" against the Cathar heresy, called the Albigensian Crusade, would proceed until the goal was accomplished in 1255, with no more people claiming to be Cathars.

Or, if you prefer Greek to the Latin title of this post, then "hodos, aletheia, zoe" would be the closest concepts to "way, truth, life" - as in the Gospel of John's recounting of Christ's statement (in English):  "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life."

The Greeks were not recognized by other civilizations as a particularly "truthful" people; in fact, they did not even have a word that strictly translates to the English "truth" or the Latin "veritas."  From Greek mythology and history, it would seem that they valued guile and slyness over honesty (the gods "tricking" [lying to] humans into doing things they were not otherwise inclined to do; the ruse of the Trojan Horse to end that war; these are but a few drops of water in a vast sea of examples).  The Persians, on the other hand, as well as the Romans, were known as possessing the virtue of being truthful, but virtue is a relative term.  The Greeks simply did not see it as being as virtuous as the ability to cunningly outwit adversaries in any of life's encounters.

The word "aletheia" is an interesting study unto itself, and rather than meaning the same thing as the English word "truth," would more accurately be translated as the quality of not being hidden:  e.g., the revealing of everything that is known about something.  This original spirit of the Greek version of truth has clearly been lost on today's leaders, be they political, executive, or otherwise inclined to sway public opinion in one way or another.  Now, telling the truth has become (for some) only the strictest, most literal revelation of facts or details that are inquired of, and a very far cry from the speaker "revealing all that is known about something, leaving nothing hidden."

When you communicate with people, do you deal with the "truth" of our modern conception, attempting to reveal as little and non-incriminating as possible without resorting to outright falsehood, or do you attempt to fully engage with the notion of "aletheia" as set forth by the ancient Greeks?

This is the objective of our search for truth.  "Reconcile" is the perfect word, as it means the re-joining of things that were once together but are now apart, a view that many of us take regarding faith and reason.

Search for the word "Seeking" in the lefthand column's search bar, if you'd like to go right to the posts that have to do with this seeking of truth and self.  Here are a few of the most visited or personal favorites:

Via, Veritas, Vita

Science vs. Philosophy, the Last 2500 Years

Truth, Not "truth"

A little freaked out this morning when I saw this online Wired article dated yesterday, as it goes into great detail about the subject of one of my very own posts here on April 8, but I'll recover.

One man's name is Piotr Wozniak, and his story and method of devising a method to remember things long-term (as opposed to forgetting them soon after the test or class is concluded) is an utterly astonishing tale as far as I'm concerned.  What he discovered through his own painstakingly detailed research on himself as the test subject, using handwritten logs over a period of time, served as independent verification of studies conducted in labs long ago that were somehow never publicized or seized upon by the intellectual community or the public.  He knew nothing of those studies (he conducted his own self research back in the 1980's before such information was readily accessible to all).

The other hero is the man who created this field over a hundred years ago with his own research and observation.  Here's an excerpt from Wired that talks about him and then about Piotr's SuperMemo program, but do your best to set aside 10 minutes or so to get through the entire article (which is actually about Piotr's method for employing working aspects of this mental phenomenon) yourself:

"In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.

How Supermemo Works
SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information you've learned and want to retain. For example, say you're studying Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it declines over time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent. When you first learn a new vocabulary word, your chance of recalling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo reminds you of the word, the rate of forgetting levels out. The program tracks this new decline and waits longer to quiz you the next time."

This is filed under "Religion" rather than "Seeking," as opposed to most of my spiritual searching-type posts which are filed under "Seeking."  Why?  Because, for some reason, abortion seems to be associated with Catholicism in particular, rather than Christianity or other faiths in general.  Again I ask, why?  To this "why?", I don't have an answer.  Why is it that anti-abortion is a well-known Catholic stereotype (or at least it's supposed to be - there are some that go so far as to claim, from both sides, that if one isn't anti-abortion, then how could one consider him or herself to be Catholic?  However, there is far more to Catholicism than abortion, and that's all I have to say about that here), yet not so for other faiths?

It's an unanswerable question, in that it should not even BE a question of whether religious beliefs dictate support of choice or non-choice, regarding whatever "choice" is in question.  This is a question of life or death - not of when life begins, or when intelligent life begins, or when consciousness arises, or when the formation of a soul occurs, for these are also not knowable - at least not in the foreseeable future.  It is, quite simply, a question of whether one believes that a human being can decide to end the physical existence of another human being for the sake of economic or lifestyle convenience, or for the possibility of the avoidance of a non-conventional life to be led by an as yet unborn person that will have a physical makeup that is different from that of "normal" human beings.  It is also not a question of whether a person ought to be allowed to protect herself from the possibility of physical harm that may arise from carrying a pregnancy to term and giving birth; that point is readily conceded by all sides of the debate, and rightfully so.

Were primitive societies morally correct in their practice of discarding newborns who were deemed unfit to live and exist in their societies?  Were later societies morally correct when they decided that life didn't begin until the baby was born, allowing the unborn child to be killed at any time up until birth?  Are WE now morally correct in deciding that babies can be killed in the womb for any reason (or for no reason at all), provided that they haven't been alive long enough to really count as human being, say, just a few months?  That the timing or method of killing them is the real issue, rather than the actual act of killing?

The wording I choose to pose these questions, as well as the questions themselves, amply reveals my beliefs in this area.  I hope you agree with me, and if not, I hope you are offended or even angered by this post, because this is an issue that, clearly, people cannot "agree to disagree" on, as it is the issue of life itself.

Right off the bat, Pope Benedict XVI said some controversial things about Islam and its contribution.  And it definitely rubbed me the wrong way; would Pope John Paul II have made such remarks?  How could those words help bring together the two faiths?  As it turns out, in my view, those were not relevant questions to be asking of this Pope.  He is not Pope John Paul II, and he is likely not interested in bringing together the two faiths.  In fact, some of his actions could be taken as "hostile" to any attempt at reconciliation between the faiths, and that just seems wrong, doesn't it?

Not necessarily.  First and foremost, this Pope (judging by his spoken and written words, which are voluminous both before and during his Papacy) seems to be extremely well-read and well-versed in not just Catholicism, not just Christianity, but also Judaism.  He cites Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers in his work, and does so in a thoughtful, even admiring manner.  The levels he delves into regarding the thought processes of other scholars and of the writers of bible are truly astounding, seeming to encompass several lifetimes worth of study and thought on the subjects.  In his view, it's probably not necessary to reconcile faiths; in his mind, their is only one true catholic and apostolic way, and it is the way of the Church.  The others are really not of interest to him, outside of what they can lend to his understanding of his own faith (in the case of the Old Testament) and he does not always take great care to hide that lack of reverence for other traditions.  Can he be faulted for this?  Here is a man who does all he can to understand what is of the greatest importance to him and to mankind, including considering all sources of knowledge and exegesis, yet who is not humbled by viewpoints outside of the Church, since to him they are of little consequence.

As different from John Paul II as he comes across, I must conclude that both men were/are true and worthy leaders of the Church, and I cannot help but embrace both of their styles and efforts for what they are and what they represent.  It does present some difficulty for me, being a person of excessive reconciliatory nature, to take a path that does not encompass all - but the exclusion is not my choice, it is theirs.  I will treat with respect, benevolence, and even love, all of those who will have it, regardless of belief or religious views; however, I continue to believe what I believe in matters of faith in God and His only Son and the tradition and authority of the Church as handed down by Jesus of Nazareth and established by Peter and Paul after the death and Resurrection, and this belief says that while I can and will enjoy my time with a multitude of "different believers," I am none too confident in how things are going to work out for them when their time on earth is through.  Their choice, not mine.

I have a problem:  data cannot be dumped into my brain as fast as I need it to be.  The 4 main inputs, my 2 eyes and 2 ears, are limited by my speed of reading and the speed of speech and audio comprehension.  At those limited rates, I will never, ever take in everything on my ever-growing list of things to know.

This technical limitation occasionally leads to wishes of a direct-to-brain interface of visual and audio media, skipping the actual joy of experiencing the accumulation of it and arriving at a state of fully informed bliss.  Today, however, I took that thought process a little further, and realized that maybe, just maybe, there's a reason for the information transfer speed limit:  the world has produced so much data, so much information, that if one attempted to transfer all of it (or even a small percentage of it) to one's brain, there might be an issue.  I envision something akin to filling up a hard drive and getting an "out of disk space" error, which not only interrupts the data transfer process, but also results in major performance issues for the entire system.  If we did contain the sum total of the world's data output inside of our brains, could our brain actually wade through all of it in its role as information processor, which is one of its other central functions (along with serving as information storage facility and director of the central nervous system)?  I doubt it.

The brain is wondrous in its role as cpu, but sorely lacks in terms of storage capacity and data input, in my view.  The solution would be something along the lines of "hot pluggable" information modules, comparable to loading a different dvd for each region of the country into your GPS nav unit, or a new movie into your dvd player.  The information modules would contain every scrap of data ever produced for a given subject matter, instantly accessible for an individual human being to jack into and make of it what he or she will.  I think Google is on that path with its project to digitize books, as is Project Gutenberg.  These efforts address only books, and just a relative few of them at that, but it's easy to see where this could eventually lead.

Which brings us back to my original desire, which is a direct-to-brain interface for the data.  The longing to know all that has been or can be known is both a blessing and a curse, but for me, mostly a blessing.