By nature people tend to see and hear and they want to see and hear. It really cannot be helped and isn’t going to be washed out of them in the space of a few social media messages. And yet, the all intellectual, justice-striving liberal left has no problem making fun of these very people who simply are subject to their own understanding of the world. Liberals would do more to gain my attention if they practiced empathy and teaching. And they wonder why they are called elitists.
According to some* ancient rabbis, you are not supposed to call out people for the evil that they do. That is a teaching that certainly didn’t last with legitimacy over time, even in the short-term, from their perspective. It really only works if you are committed to asceticism, which unfortunately, I used to. It took many years and essentially a transcendental experience to understand that asceticism is not required for truth, just as what I had long known, suffering is not required for wisdom.
Though I shouldn’t neglect to say that I only came to understand that asceticism is not required for truth based on my own experiences with asceticism. Just as it took a transcendental experience for me to understand that such things are not required to know the truth.
God is a lot like the totem in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode, “Among the Lotus Eaters.” That is not to say that God is a lie, though certainly the upperclass reduces God to control people on the bottom rank and file, but what did that lie of a totem still do? It still offered a hand of guidance, survival skills, when their judgement and memory was stolen from them. Yes, they all deserved their memories, but they continued to exist through faith in “a way” despite the lies of the totem and class division.
When you are captured within a bucket of lies and distortion of reality, God can still reach in and find you and God knows better even when you don’t know better yourself.
I hold no religion, but I have met God. It is a quite unmentionable experience.
And yes, eventually, I got the point to question human suffering. God still had an answer: “It doesn’t work that way.”
With my disposition I am the perfect person not to be believed, which also made me the perfect candidate for God to visit. Besides, asking for any one person’s belief in what I say is the farthest thing from my mind. I grew out of that decades ago.