May 1, 2012

• What we believe

  Our abstract beliefs often do not correctly translate into our experiences. We either do not understand the content of a belief, or we have wrongly predicted that we do in fact have the belief.

  In other words, there is often a divide between some belief you say you have, and a situation in which that belief seems it would lead you to do some particular action you don’t end up doing.

  It’s like when mom said that dad’s girlfriend had been away, and he started sitting at lunch with her. Then when his girlfriend came back, he still walked with mom down to the lunch area and introduced her to his girlfriend. He did that instead of shrinking back from the situation. Since he liked mom, that showed that what he did was in harmony with his beliefs. What he believed meant something.

  I often feel like this with respect to the truth; in fact, I have since high school. I’ve thought: I’ll do anything for the truth. I want the truth so bad, it seems to matter far above anything else, I clearly want it, give it to me!

  But: how do you live? Life has a double meaning. We not only do particular actions, like drink orange juice, go home for Christmas, buy a wrench from the store – we do larger things with our lives. We choose, in the long term, whether or not we will be an apologizer, or we will persevere, or we will be a good father. These things are not choices where we can just say ‘I will be a good father’ or ‘I want to be a good father’. Being a good father actually looks like something, and it’s by doing all those actual things that you end up being a good father. Beliefs mean things, and sometimes we’re wrong about what they mean, or we think we believe them, but when it comes to actually doing what those beliefs mean we should do, we don’t do them, even though we said we believed the belief.

  What you will do with your life is different than what you believe you will do with your life. Life has to actually be lived: you will choose who to be. You have not yet chosen; in this moment, you have chosen a little more, but only time will unravel your complete answer. Your answer of what you actually believe.

  Kierkegaard thought he lived in a country where everyone thought they were Christians, but no one actually was.  If you want to find out what you believe, check your life, not your head.

  Maybe it’s completely unimportant to have a pang of hunger for truth at one moment in particular; maybe a life full of honoring truth is all that would matter.  That’s why when people ask for God to strike them down, or for him to reveal himself definitively, nothing happens.  God is interested in more than just your feeling in one moment.  He asks us: would you follow me if it was difficult, if you found me slowly, like a film where objects gradually grew colored?  God created the whole universe and gave you your whole life to get to you; how far would you go to get to him?  More than a moment of shouting ‘Show yourself’?

  So this is the intimate connection between our beliefs, our self-conception, the meaning of concepts, long-term actions, and life.

  • 1:08 pm
  • 1 Comment