48th Confession

Well, here we are in March now, and I'll get back to answering everyone who wrote in on the last few posts, probably on the next post. But that's too much heaviness, for right now. We'll just leave that for right now and talk about interpretations.

Hermaneutics is one of those things that either scares people off or makes them look at you funny if you say that you're interested in it.  I mean, it's not exactly rocket science, but if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

But that's the thing: everybody DOES do it. Everything that you can sense, feel, consider - all of it - are interpretations of the world around you. It's all signals, constantly being decoded by your brain as it tries to make sense of the world around you.

For example: how do you know when a person is upset? Their eyes narrow, their voice changes, their body tenses up....all these things are able to be interpreted in a matter of seconds to interpret a person's mood. How much more is there to interpret in the world?

Which leads into the big question: what is a correct interpretation? Or are all interpretations equally valid?

It's almost like asking, "What is truth?" Abstract nouns have a funny way of being ephemeral at best, and poorly defined at worst. Love, truth, beauty, goodness- all are up for interpretation, and none have been able to be adequately defined or explained by science. There is no magic formula for being beautiful; no matter how much one moisturizes, makes friends, and is a general "good" person - which we shouldn't use, because "good" isn't quantifiable - there  is always, ALWAYS, going to be someone that can't stand them.

I figure, the same holds true for interpretations: for every thirty or so people who hold to a particular interpretation of something, there's gonna be at least fifteen - a very vocal fifteen - who will disagree. Loudly. Sometimes with rocks.

But that's not the issue: the issue is, can something be utterly true? I surely and truly hope that only one equals one, and evermore ought to be so. But we need more than hope to prove absolute truth. So let's look at a couple of things.

Atheists and scientists employ empiricism and logic. But it's theoretically provable that two equals one, which proves that logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority. And we're expanding our range of senses at an alarming rate, so empiricism cannot be the be-all, end-all either. Plus, we're dealing with something that is above senses: you can see a woman be sawed in half, but it doesn't mean she has been, for example.

So what CAN we rely upon? Science can be fooled, humans can be fooled, anything can be faked...So perhaps the answer is, truth cannot be absolutely proved or disproved.

But let me show you a different approach.

Truth must come from outside ourselves; if it comes from within, it is nothing more than delusion. However, truth needs to be verified by several outside sources; if it's too narrow of a field, that limits what you can accept as true. It needs to come from several conflicting people, and if it's scientifically provable, all the better.

But even that cannot help with the big question; is there a God? I've seen Him proven through the existence of moral code, sentience, high-level communication, the genesis of the universe, a trifecta proposition, and seemingly no-loss bets...and I've seen the secular humanist atheists attack each and every of these arguments and rationally (logically?) disprove each of them.

So is there a God? I cannot prove Him for certain; if I could, I wouldn't need Him. If I could understand Him, I'd be like Him; I can only catch glimpses of his thumbprints here and there. I see enough circumstantial evidence to make my faith a part of me, even on my worst days. And, as CS Lewis once put it, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."