I;'m going to go out on a limb here and enter the realm of speculative theology, or whatever the following might constitute. In any case, it is not original (heh, heh,) with me, but it is so darned curious that I thought it would fit into this topic. In any case it will arouse, I think, some flammable situations as well as, I hope, some genuine questioning.
This is right now, I feel, the crux of this thread Fhansen:~“Why is it that we prefer to be right? Not just to be in the right but to actually associate with righteousness to such a degree that we could be shattered emotionally if proven to be wrong?” and further"To me this is an oddity, a disorder so to speak, something which should not be."
What if it is exactly what is meant to be? What if we are, as often happens, misinterpreting the story of the fall by 180 degrees? If I am not mistaken, that particular part of the Bible is to be taken as allegory or parable or such. So what if we make the extraordinary leap as was proposed to me by a friend? This person told me that in his opinion the so called “story of the fall” was nothing more or less than the accounting of Man’s ascendancy from the animals, that point at which Man was able to distinguish himself as an entity and postulate an outside world? In other words, he passed from the at-onement with Nature that animals instinctively live in (Paradise or Eden) to the subject/object relationship we have with our world, and the self-reflexive awareness that goes with that?
I know it is a big chunk to swallow, but would it not explain a lot of things? Relative to this thread, one might say that with a new mind, Man had to believe that he knew simply as a matter of survival. The alternative would be chaos. And he did know. He knew what was–in particular for him, at that place and time,–a viable way of dealing with Nature, the world, and the Unknown. As man spread over the globe, these ways became adapted to icy conditions, deserts, shore lines and island encounters with Nature, as well as with plains and mountains. But in every case there was a known right way to live in those places.
Whoever grew up in any local had behind them the knowledge and rightness of what was a successful way of living in a particular area. And over time as well, different kinds of customs came into being because they worked. And they were know to work by experience.
But what if two groups met, each from a different living situation? If they got along, they would soon discover that each had a ‘right’ way that was useful for living where they came from. They might not, on the other hand, be useful somewhere else, You and I might not fare very well in either a jungle or a desert, for instance. So we have tried and true “rightnesses” due to extraction from a particular adaptation. But are they transferable to another set of circumstances? perhaps to some degree. But in any case, the set of skills that are non-functional in the new environment are still thought of as “right” for no other reason than that they worked where that group grew up.
So we have a proven “right” way not functioning in an area its means are not adapted to. But the rightness, the sense of rightness, remains. We see this easily in immigrants from the old world to here, or we experience it as our sense of strangeness when we travel. But what if instead of geological circumstances we had to deal with the mental landscape? What then?
Suddenly, everything has a bearing on what we experience, starting with language and family and on up through conventions and governments and economics and our experience with each of those. We are no longer in a village, we are in a world of thousands of linguistic views, and philosophies and mind maps we don’t even have a way of getting a handle on. Some languages don’t have nouns, or verb structures are weird, or time or gender don’t have the same significance as our own way. Go figure.
But we still have that sense that we are right. And that is good and useful. Because without it we would have no buffer in a new situation and would become immediately disoriented. But with it we can adapt and learn our way into a new environment.
The difficulty might come when we get to subtleties and we become adamantine in our particular view because there is no sensible survival factor attached to changing, so we stand pat. I guess the question being asked here is is that right or useful, and what if it is or isn’t’ relative to someone else’s view? What base and what standard do we use to get onto a level field, the same page, or whatever? Can that happen if we simply insist that we are right just because we know we are from our parochial experience? Does our parochial experience of being “right” distribute with a 1/1 correspondence to Reality over all time and space even just on our world speck? It may be a good question to ask.
One definition of “sin” is “to miss the point.” Perhaps the stain of original sin Fhansen is pointing to might be a simple mechanism we are utilizing in order to have stability in the world until a better way comes along. But will our rightness, legitimate as it might be, blind us to better, greater, visions?
