You don’t know, you say? Well, some people handle that just fine, and simple accept that they don’t know, but others need some sort of assurance. They need to feel that what they ‘know’ (as in: “believe in”) is the truth. Without this assurance they crack up, so to say, and don’t cope well with life anymore.
Such individuals are drawn to ‘miracle men’ like flies to manure, and often they end up in a camp purely by chance, only because that particular camp was the first to ‘catch’ them when they fell. When reason, logic and evidence make it impossible for them to stay in one ‘miracle camp’, they simply change to another ‘miracle camp’. They rarely – if ever – grow wise enough to simply start accepting that they don’t know. No, they just change the contents of ‘the truth’ they believe in, and when one such ‘truth’ falls they just replace it with another. They need to. They cannot stand a life without ‘knowing’…
Often it is hard to believe in the ‘truth’ presented to them, because the evidence supporting it is flimsy at best. But quite often these ‘miracle seekers’ simply lower the bar when it comes to accepting ‘evidence’ supporting their ‘truth’. Likewise, they reject all evidence against their ‘truth’. Alas! They are stuck, as if caught in a loop…
Naturally, when I say this, we probably all think of different extremist Christian groups, one more ignorant and deluded than the other: British-Israelites and Creationists being good examples in this context. When reality is not good enough for them, when reality doesn’t fit into their religion, they just invent a new reality, more flattering to them, more easily comprehensible for them and more easy to live with.
One thing that is symptomatic to such ‘miracle seekers’ is the strong will to convince all others that they are 100% right. The doubt others have regarding their beliefs is enough for them to start losing faith, so they have to convince all others that they are right, and all dissidence is seen as ‘evil’ or even ‘satanic’. And in a sense it is to them: it makes them lose faith, and they need this faith to survive.
This naturally explains the need for Christians to mission. Deep within their hearts they know that what they believe in is – simply put – bullshit, but if they can only make others believe in it, then it will be easier for them to believe in it as well…
So we should all believe in the same, have no dissidence, and never question anything that our group stands for… that would be so much easier, so much better and so much more comfortable. Right?…. An entire globe with one religion, one human race and one culture! Hallelujah!
Well; maybe not…
If only man was stronger, had a stronger character, had more backbone and a better ability to on his own separate right from wrong. If only man could be more Stoic, and accept that some things are, some knowledge is, beyond the grasp of the human mind. Aye, perhaps this will change, and we should seek to ensure such a positive transformation of man, but until man is better, we just have to accept that there is so much that we simply don’t know or understand. And we can and must live with that, without making up stories about a virgin giving birth to the son of some desert god, or about fanciful stories told us by an imagined being in caves, or similar nonsense.
Life is good, sans ‘miracles’ and ‘salvation’, sans a beginning and an end for our world, sans self-assuring lies and ‘greater-than-man’ beings. Yes, we can enjoy and even wallow in all sorts of fantastic ideas, we can hope for and dream of a more colourful world, and by doing so make our own world more colourful, but we must do so without the weakness of character that we so clearly see in many political and religious individuals, who base and explain their entire existence on such wild hopes and unrealistic dreams. The sky does not come crashing down if we admit to ourselves that we don’t know what is true and what is not; if we live our lives in accordance with what we do know, instead of what we would want to know.
