On Sun, 18 Apr 2004, Michael Golden wrote:
>
> Show us something better than science for trying to figure out the world
> and how it works. Science is a self-correcting guessing machine which
> becomes more and more useful over time. Myths and religions are
> suppositions of reality which most of the time accept no revisions. Your
> assumption that they are true does not make them such.
I asked the same question of my stake president, and he didn't have a good
answer for me. I agree with you that most of what people call absolute is no
such thing; rather, I believe this life was specifically created to be
ambiguous, including the spiritual parts, so that we have to affirm repeatedly
how we want to live, rather than being condemned by one isolated experience.
But I can also offer something better than the scientific method for living.
The scientific method doesn't work well because we're not smart enough to
figure out life in one lifetime. We'd spend our whole lives trying to set up
unbiased experiments and isolate all the variables, which are constantly
moving around.
Instead, we have to do life engineering - find something that works kinda okay
and then bang on it until it works a little better. You may never get all the
variables isolated, never fully nail down exactly who this being is that's
nudging you from time to time, but you /can/ find ever more powerful methods
of maximizing the variables important to you: happiness, life, connection with
others.
Put another way, I used to look for the Grand Unified Theory of life from
which I could always mathematically derive the best course of action. But I'm
just not smart enough for that. Instead, I focus on what actually makes life
worthwhile - my relationships with other people. And in making that
transition, I find that there's Somebody who isn't interested in being a
subject of my laboratory experiments, but who is very interested in having a
relationship with me.
-J
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