Take a Stand - Do We Know What We Think We Know?
This is the first of my weekly series about what I believe. Some of the things here will be theological concepts, some will be simple common sense. In these articles, I want to examine my core beliefs and try and find out why I believe what I believe. I'm inviting everyone who reads this to come with me on my journey. I want to try to bury misconceptions I might have and dig into the truth of what I think I know. I'll try to apply it to everyday life, but sometimes I might not be able to. I welcome any discussion of what you think about it in the comments. Let's get started.
So, are there things that you know to be true? We know where north and south are. We know what is up and what is down (at least in relation to where we are on Earth). We can list a hundred things that we know, but what if those things changed? Here's a quote from Men In Black, where Kay is trying to comfort Jay, who just found out aliens existed.
A person is smart. People are dumb. Everything they've ever "known" has
been proven to be wrong. A thousand years ago everybody knew as a fact,
that the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago,
they knew it was flat. Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were
alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
What would life be like if we knew that whatever we believed was subject to change at any moment? I'm not talking about subjective truth, I'm talking about the preconceived ideas that we have. For example, on September 10, 2001 I knew that terrorists would never try a big attack on the United States. Our security and intelligence were too good. September 11, 2001 what I knew was wrong. They could and would attack us on our own soil.
Before reading a post on Cerulean Sanctum about failure, I knew that everything I had screwed up in my life was my fault. Everything that had not turned out the way I wanted it was because of something I had done. Now I understand that sometimes God doesn't want things to work out the way we want them to.
Through this series, I want to analyze things that we believe, things that we see everyday, current events that happen. I want to find out the reasons why we think we know what we know. I'll look at things that I believe and sometimes present positions on why I believe differently. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes I'll discover something that we thought we knew is wrong.