Electronics, the Internet, and Us (a fable)

Once upon a time, there was a family consisting of a mother and father and some children.  The parents, in thinking they were being kind and loving, provided everything the children needed and wanted, even to the point of tending to their hygiene, dressing them, cutting their meat, feeding them their meals,  and keeping them indoors because they thought they would be safer inside.

The parents, unfortunately, were killed in a freak accident and the children were left on their own to fend for themselves.  It was catastrophic for them.

(Faced with the requirement to find the square root of 123456789 without a calculator, or die, most people would die.)

Enormous Truth

 

In the New Testament is the sentence, "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32) This is the same author that gave us: "In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God." 

Both of these set me off into a maelstrom of thought about what we think of as the truth.  Every civilization for more than 5000 years has had its version of "the truth" and even today there are many versions of the truth: Christian sects, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the way of the monk, the priest, the yoga, and the Fourth Way, plus others.  And there is a trap in each.  

The trap is when the follower of a teaching takes it as the truth without question, without reservation.  We, individually, are like passengers on an ocean ship.  Everything is fine until the ship sinks, and we are afloat on the open ocean.

While the ship was sailing along, we were quite content.  The captain and crew seemed qualified, the accommodations were good, the food was good, and the company was likewise compatible.  The all of a sudden, poof, it was gone, and we were left to make it on our own.  We are lost because relied on what was told to us by others who thought they knew the truth.

There is a distinct possibility that they didn't know the truth, even though they sincerely thought they did.  Same for all of those before, and until now, who preach that what they think is the truth.

Oh, there is truth alright, we just don't know what it is yet.

The truth may be so enormous that we cannot comprehend it.  The Earth, a collective noun, is a good example.  There is so much to it that no one person really understands it.  There are many disciplines of science that deal with it, such as Geology, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc., yet no one person can comprehend the Earth in its entirety, and more is discovered about it every day.  It is the same for God, another collective noun.

What was thought to be the truth turns out to be not quite the truth.  The same can be said for religions.  All three of the Indian blind men were telling the truth as they felt the elephant.