concerning knowledge.

it is, quite constantly, a battle within mind to root out those beliefs and aspects of nature and reality which are entirely self-generated or, i should also say, reactive to cultural exposure. when applied to the category of 'God' i come across a catch 22 that is inevitable and inevitably unavoidable. what i think of God is just that, what i think. even were i to word the sentence as 'God is ___,' i run into the problem of promoting and advertising what is, ultimately, a subjective position on the subject.

yet before i question whether or not we can ever know something about God, even if it is our knowledge of our inability to know, i must first ask whether or not it is important to know. under the weight of eternity and in the shadow of forever that question may seem silly, and to some, quite offensive, but i ask it all the same. and let me explain why..

whether you regard the bible as a true historical account of everything that has happened within it's time-span, or as allegory there is a truth buried within the first pages that i think is all too illuminating. in the 'beginning,' there in the 'garden' where God created the 'first man' and the 'first woman' they lived in harmony with God. a perfect community, however inevitably doomed it may have been. despite the account of the 'days' of creation, these first few chapters of 'God's Word' do not tell us just how long 'adam' & 'eve' lived in perfect community with their creator. however, it does state the action that led to their banishment. eating, whatever fruit you imagine, of the tree of knowledge of good & evil.

was it evil to obtain knowledge of good as well as evil? ironically, when God commanded that they not eat of that tree, i do not believe that they regarded it as a moral command but they, in no uncertain terms, trusted Him. if they had no knowledge of good & evil then they could hardly judge that learning such virtue & vice would be particularly 'evil.' (what does this mean in terms of the supposed 'innate' or 'intrinsic' moral law, which is preached to be something already inside of us when we're born?)

but what really strikes me here is that 'knowledge of' comes before the words 'good' and 'evil.' it is not that there were two trees named 'good' and the other 'evil' that the first humans were allowed to choose which they would eat from, instead it is a tree that contains the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. however negative it usually sounds, trust in ignorance to the subject of morality seems to have been held more important than the knowledge of morality itself. how can this be?

there are usually a great many angles from which to approach each and every individual story. let's take this tale of a garden and it's ideological trees out of its setting at the beginning of the world and place it at the beginning of each individual human life. born into the perfection of ignorance, all of your needs provided by those looking out for you, trusting in the woman who bore you and the father who provides for you. after a time you begin to make sense of the world around you. you form conceptions from all that you perceive and even begin learning the language, whether that is intrinsic or externally taught to you. eventually you reach a point where your mother is cooking at the stove and you see the orange glow of pure heat, you extend a hand towards it but your hand is grabbed ever so delicately by the soft caring hands of your mother. "don't touch that, it's hot." this command comes to you not as a moral rebuke, though it does try to appeal to whatever sense of reason you may have established up to this point. the command also provides a measure of comfort to the mother who states it, she believes that she will be obeyed, though she really knows better deep down inside. she looks away for a moment to tend to something else, the orange glow pulses again to your eyes and with curiousity and anticipation you extend your arm again and grab the stove with your hand. a split-second later, the pain reaching your tiny nervous system, the synapses being interpreted, you are made aware. in that instant it is not the morality of pain/pleasure you learn but the hard truth that for all of your actions there will be consequences and reactions whether you want them or not.

there is always a down-side to knowing. but human pride extends so far as to believe itself capable of comprehending anything, even the deepest truths of the universe, down to the tiniest sub-atomic particle suspended in space-time and held together somehow explained by quantum physics. "we'll never know till we try." that terrible mantra of human experience: 'experience as much as you can because you only live once!'

the knowledge is what separates us from God. because He is turned into a category, a topic, a spiritual entity summed up in and defined by our human words. we know God, we love to say. He has made Himself known, we shout. when in all reality, the ignorance we were born into was closer to perfection that all of our empirical knowledge and rationality. we have established systems of how to live as God demands, but it remains our system. manmade, created in the imageo vir.

so what are those beliefs that i have built up myself and based upon my own subjective presuppositions? all of them. even the belief that my beliefs are the results of subjective interpretation. we live in the age of information when knowledge is available everywhere, but is knowledge really what will save us? may it never be! one of the subjective presuppositions of mine is that in the ignorance of trust is where i want to be. dependent and utterly reliant upon the being that i call 'God.' man seeks the tree for himself and misses the entire garden as result, which is the result of ignorance?

we shall continue to learn, we shall always interpret reality & our experiences, but lean not on your own understanding*

(*this is a paradox, because it demands that one lean on the understanding that he should not lean on his own understanding, yet a paradox, however appearing to be self-defeating it may seem, is not necessarily false, in an objective sense)