Belief

I was watching dvds of Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. It got me thinking and inspired me to write what comes next. The episode that I watched was episode 11; Knowledge or certainty. Where Bronowski beautifully looks at the fallibility of knowledge and the tragic consequences of certainty. If you have have seen this episode, no doubt you will remember the segment he filmed at Auschwitz and you will know just how powerful it was.

So, it got me thinking about what people regard as knowledge and perceptions of that. I suppose what I was really thinking about was religion and atheism. I am not particularly religious, but I am interested in seeking out the big why us, why are we here questions. If that means reading the Bible I can dip into that. I have incidentally also read the Qur'an - expecting to find statements about lets kill unbelievers and all women must be veiled and of course women are not permitted to drive - and what did I find? None of that.

Anyway, as Bronowski said in one of the episodes, let's not beat about the bush! You can't pigeon hole knowledge, no one has the right to say they have absolute knowledge. For what is knowledge but something that is hung on our own personal experiences, values and our own situation. Knowledge/science is always fuzzy. If it were not the case how would we have evolved? We evolve by learning, whether individually or socially. Imagine a child being born that knows everything there is to know. What an terrible state that child would live in! There must always be something we do not know, there must always be doubt. Nothing then is fixed, but everything is fluid around us; knowledge/science is believed, then new theories are born and knowledge/science progresses on.

I came across this story about Genelle Guzman-McMillan, a World Trade Center survivor. Who decides who Paul was? I can be skeptical, but I can never be absolutely certain.

I don't want to speak for fanatics, I do no like a rabid Christians, or rabid Jews or rabid Muslims telling me I must believe. But nor do I like rabid atheists, telling people they have some sort of mental disability if they believe in a God

I remember a few years ago reading a biography of an Asian woman and her family who came to Australia. In the book, she talks about her grandmother living in an apartment in Hong Kong. One day a couple of Christian missionaries knocked on her door and were invited in. In the lounge room they happened to spy a statue of the Buddha and told the grandmother that if she was going to be a Christian then she couldn't have statues of Buddha in the apartment. The grandmother decided that she would give the statue to other members of her family. No, said the Christians, she needed to spread the gospel to others, not give them statues. Not knowing what to do, the grandmother smashed the statue. It was a family heirloom.

No one has the right to claim absolute truth

A really good documentary that I found on the religion/atheism debate is this one, I think in the end,it all comes down to respecting each others values.