Life’s full of
paradoxes. And we do well to let their strange dissonant music ring through our
lives. It’s surely an illusion that only rational linear thought in a nice
straight line can yield us valid propositions, or as we like to call them, “the
truth.”
Pontius
Pilate, according to the Christian Bible, (John 18 v 38) famously asked Jesus
about the truth he said he was representing. Or as Francis Bacon put it, “‘What
is truth,’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
Jesus’
answer would surely have been about faith in God, i.e. a belief system.
Scholars puzzle over what Pilate meant, but in fairness to the infamous
hand-washer, he raises a huge and perennially impossible question.
Some of us have a
relative set of answers. Truth is only a product of a time and a place. What’s
true here and now wasn’t true there and then. Truth is culturally and
historically defined. Something is true until it is proved false. Or even:
truth is ultimately impossible; all we can do is test the validity, the
usefulness of propositions; truth is an illusion.
Maybe this was
Pilate’s public position. Perhaps he was saying that Jesus didn’t seem guilty
to him, but that finding the truth, in the furnace of Jerusalem’s politics, was
not a feasible ambition. So, as we say nowadays, “oh, whatever….”
Some of us have an
absolute set of answers: Jesus did. Many, maybe most, religious people do. They
don’t study religions only in a comparative sense; they think, however
tolerantly or intolerantly, that their way is the only true way. We all know the
agonies and terrors this mindset can deliver to mankind, but I’m not going to
get drawn into a typical internet argument: “atheists also do appalling things
– Hitler was an atheist.” “yeah, but look at…” etcetcetcetc. I’m just observing
that these are two different ways of looking at the world: one is relative, one
is absolute.
There is also another
position, the position many of us are in. We feel uneasy about a totally relativist
position. Some things seem always to be true, for ever and always, anywhere, no
matter what the cultural or historical context.
For example: children should
never, ever, be corrupted and brutalized. We may try to understand the position,
the psychology, of certain people in a particular time or place, but: they
simply shouldn’t and mustn’t do it. No ifs and buts, no excuses.
That would seem to
all of us to be an absolute. I hope. Even “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” said
that if anyone “offends” one of these little ones, “it is better for him that a
millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the sea.”
And yet we middle-grounders
simply can’t accept that there is, somewhere, one whole belief system that is
uniquely and totally true, however attractive in some aspects it might appear. Conversely, we may feel that relative and rational approaches to the world about us
hit the buffers on certain huge questions or feelings.
How can it be that
me writing this, synapses flashing away, fingers clattering across a keyboard,
neck aching etc, this life form, will one day not be? How can it be that you
reading this, getting bored or irritated, will one day also not be? Our consciousnesses will simply end.
Where does
a life go? How long is eternity? How big is infinity?
Children, neither
relativists nor absolutists, ask such huge questions, and if we give ourselves
the chance, we too can feel a sense of profound wonder at these questions,
which are only in one sense answerable.
Maths
and science can provide answers. But in terms of our mental states, our
mindsets, our sense of who we are, we still feel awed and bewondered. Our
brains haven’t evolved to finally and comprehensively understand eternity, or
to accept nothingness, non-being.
“What’s it like, being asleep?”
“I don’t know; I was asleep at the time.”
“What’s it like being dead.”
“No-one can tell us.”
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