Concepts of God and Religion

[patrice]

48. Agree about how one decides what's, more or less, true. But it's not my job to "get" OP or you

to do anything. It is not possible, under most conditions, to force anyone to understand anything and mimmicing isn't the same thing as understanding and doesn't even necessarily lead to it.

My responsibilities are to manifest reality as best I can, given my circumstances & understanding. That's what others are supposed to do too; I can call on them to engage in those responsibilities, but it's not my job to MAKE them anything; they MUST choose and I must deal with their choices honestly and responsibly myself; anything less, even in the name of "validity", is fascism.

If we tell people to stand for the truth as best they know it and, then, violate their autonomy for doing that, more often than not, it makes them and me more blind, not only on the issue at hand, but in many other ways too, because of alienation. Too much force and you have prisons full of people who have cut their own noses off to spite YOUR face and lots of other cultural dysfunctions.

Because we are social and therefore should be calling those with whom we disagree to honesty, by being honest ourselves, that means that I/you must not lie in the face of differences either. Most of the time the means (while they don't necessarily justify the ends) can be more process-important than the ends, because how one does something can shape what happens, so if coercion is producing reactionaries and contrarians, the ends/outcomes are bent by that. Yes, at some point a stand must be made for the outcomes, but we can't even identify what/why/when/how if we have bent the whole process by trying to "get" people to _______________ while we are also saying that they should be honest in order to free themselves and, hence, others.

People are different and it's best to let them identify themselves, so they can then CHOOSE if/how they are also the same. If we can let them do that, we might be able to end up with valid reasons for saying when/why/how someone has chosen dysfunction purposefully as differentiated from those who are having more situationally based problems that might be ameliorated by appropriate responses.

An analogy: If you "kick a dog for not singing opera" you make monsters out of yourself and the dog and kill any singing the "dog" might have ever been capable of and, possibly, depending upon the circumstances, extinct all singing all together anyway, so, ultimately "opera" could become an unknown unknown and also thus, possibly, a threat to the invention of which NECESSITY is the mother. In short, you don't want to turn the young lady with the cure for cancer into a grocery clerk, before she has even had half of a chance to find HER way.

Have you ever read Thomas R. Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions? Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed?