The Omnipresent Burden

There is an inescapable burden we humans bear, whether conscious of it or not, whether we find ourselves content with it or not--an omnipresent burden that affects everything about our lives, aspirations, epistemologies, worldviews, and emotions.

No one needs to endure the loss of a friend or family member, a traumatic vehicle crash, an abduction, or financial anxiety to confront the deepest of fears.  To find true terror all we need to do is reflect on our limitations.  That is enough to not just frighten but mortify us, for there is nothing of greater consequence than deducing the nature of existence and discovering it as quickly as possible--and there is nothing that can ignite more despair over the consequences of this pursuit than recognizing the inherent limitations we humans possess, greatly restricting our ability to learn the answers we seek.  To deny reality and truth is to succumb to the greatest of inconsistencies and impossibilities; to claim to know either one must exercise great caution, lest we deceive ourselves.

Some of my recent posts have been quite existential because I have been directly addressing similar truths in my own intellectual and personal life.  I have written at least briefly about postmodern epistemology and why it is true whether we prefer so or not [1]; I have addressed how a form of theistic absurdism arises from knowing a god exists but not knowing his nature [2]; I have tackled the tension between security and certainty that most, if not all, ideas have to navigate [3]; I have proven the utter meaninglessness, nihilistic amorality, and futility that mark human existence if God does not exist [4].  After 20 years of life, I have recognized and accepted these things.  But many have done neither.  And doing both will not necessarily alleviate the existential and epistemological difficulties of human existence.

If people truly considered the logic and verifiability of their most cherished beliefs, many would find that their motivations, moral ideas, religious choices, and life priorities have little to no logical support and that they are either living for an unverified belief at best and something entirely false at worst.  My greatest frustration is watching other people rarely detect this in their own lives, much less the lives of those around them.

But when we begin to embrace reason, shed falsities and fallacies, and test everything, we come to realize that our own intellectual limitations can terrify far more than the petty concerns that can occupy human minds.  Understanding that you stand on an ideological precipice from which, wherever you wander, you will bear full responsibility for your actions and decisions in the areas of ethics, spirituality, and every other area imaginable would likely horrify people who possess actual comprehension of their condition--and the fright would likely escalate when the realization dawns that we are not equipped very well for our pursuit of the elusive but supremely relevant thing called truth.  Nothing but logic is inherently reliable, yet even logic itself amounts to but a mere candle's worth of light in a vast space of darkness that stretches to unknown lengths around us.

This is the omnipresent burden of humanity.  Left in this vacuum of knowledge--a cosmos in which the existence of an uncaused cause (referred to by many as God) responsible for the material world is logically undeniable--nothing could dispel our ignorance about matters moral and spiritual except revelation from the entity which created us.  The material world and the subjective feelings and consciences of humans could never reveal moral facts, for example; to know these something other than natural theology is logically required.  To know these we need special revelation, similar in concept to something like the Bible or the Quran.  However, knowing that there is no such thing as ultimate moral knowledge apart from what is properly called "special divine revelation" does not inform us of which alleged book of divine revelation is valid.  The candidates--the Bible, Quran, Book of Mormon, Vedas, Book of Shadows, and the others--cannot all be true at the same time, for they make conflicting claims about morality, the nature of God, salvation, the afterlife, and other topics both great and small.

It is matters like this that possess the utmost importance and urgency, yet our limitations will not disappear simply because of the scope or significance of the issue we are investigating.  Matters like this can drive people insane for this very reason.  Inquiring into the possible moral nature or character of the uncaused cause (if it is closer to the traditional theistic imaginings of God than to the entity described by deists), the ultimate purpose behind creation, and reliability of our non-mental faculties like our 10 senses [5] can drive us crazy for the very reason that our epistemological limitations will linger over most of what we search for and conclude.

How will you choose to respond to this, knowing that you will bear whatever consequences result from your decision?


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/postmodernism-clarifying-straw-man.html

[2].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/theistic-absurdism.html

[3].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/security-and-certainty.html

[4].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-futility-of-existence-without-god.html

[5].  Yes, we have at least 10:
https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/more-than-five-senses.html