HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
July 30, 2005 Recently on this website someone adduced the argument that his knowledge of the spiritual realm or the divine estate, whatever name it goes by, is given him by a higher faculty, like a sixth sense. Just as a person born blind cannot possibly comprehend the visual aspect of the world that is manifest unto a sighted person, so a person like myself, who depends on only the five commonplace senses, cannot possibly appreciate the higher dimension that is laid bare before those individuals who possess this higher faculty. I’ve heard this same line of reasoning several times over the past thirty years, usually in a somewhat simpler guise: “Faith is something that you have or don’t have. If you don’t have it, you can´t understand what people who do have it understand.” This is just verbal trickery, of course. But it makes a fairly good stopper momentarily. Suppose I meet on the street a man born blind and tell him there’s a mailbox a block away. He asks how I know. I tell him I have sight. He challenges me to prove it. I lead him to the mailbox. He’s impressed but still skeptical. So we try some more experiments. Sooner or later, he’s forced to admit that I know what I’m talking about. I must have the faculty of vision, whatever that is. This, in fact, is the situation in which congenitally blind people find themselves. They know from experience that sighted people do have some faculty they lack. The conclusion is inescapable from all the evidences of their daily lives. But people who claim to have personal experience of the divine, telling me they see things I cannot see, and implying that I am inferior and thus have no right to question them—such people cannot lead me to anything I cannot myself find usually faster and better. They never lead me to the mailbox. Instead they have a whole litany of excuses, rationalizations, sophistries, quotations and other verbal feints and parries that never get results. One man who writes for UK says he knows he has eternal life and that Jesus created the world. Another says he has cosmic consciousness. There are other ways of phrasing it too, all mutually equivalent. But I say put up or shut up. I say show me. They argue that they don’t have to prove anything to anyone or show anybody anything. But if this is so, why are they always writing articles trying to prove in words what they cannot or will not prove in deeds. Religionists always talk that talk, but they can never walk that walk. For thirty years, I’ve been asking people to move a mountain by means of faith, as they claim they can. Move anything, even a single clod of earth or a grain of sand, by invoking divine powers, and you’ll go a long way towards selling God to Thomas Keyes. So far no one has ever moved a thing for me, but if I compiled all the verbiage that was directed at me to explain, justify or excuse their inability to move anything, I’d probably have several books. You don’t have to prove anything to me, you say, but why do you keep trying so lamely to do so? I´ve concluded that religionists are charlatans and hypocrites, but I´ll admit I´m wrong when I see that mountain move. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
