Tabula Spurca

Lately I have been meandering my way through a certain Christmas present of mine, entitled "The Gospel According to Disney." The more I read, the more a certain thought has grown (though perhaps it would be more rightly called a fear). I have harbored this idea for several weeks now- for months, maybe years- but it has become unwieldy as of late. The notion is that our entire lives are infinitely and unavoidably affected by the programing we receive in the first few years of our lives on earth. That the way we see everything from God to an ant crawling on our finger is molded by the surroundings we're placed in, things that we cannot control. It has been shocking to me to revisit my favorite childhood movies and storybooks and trails in the wood. There is such a different view from the adult perspective; I stand in a place where I see this, but simultaneously cling to the childhood I can barely say I've departed from.

I have been able to recognize many of the things that helped to program me before the age of twelve. They range from Pocahontas and Avatar and Roald Dahl, which I have already mentioned, to The Busy World of Richard Scarry and Liewe Heksie and obscure little chapter books my mom once bought at a garage sale... There are many. But I am continually overwhelmed by thought of the vast wealth of things I have not been able to recognize, that have all sorts of invisible impacts on the way I see the world.

From a very young age, I have been taught that sin is inevitable, since Adam sinned and thereby polluted the whole world. I have been taught since before I could speak that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And I was always able to accept this with ease: it's obvious to me that people make moral errors. What has come to bother me of late is the one part of this narrative I was never able to accept, for whatever (unknown) reason: that sin is all Adam's fault. I have never believed that people sin because they are raised in sinful environments, but have instead argued that we sin because the nature of human faculty is to test out the extremes it's capable of. The first human beings' evolution into human beings was marked by their desire to know. That's one of the huge marks of distinction that mankind bares, is it not? The desire to know for knowledge's sake, though it have no benefit, though it may even bear detriment. I continue to stand by the fact that any human being, by the pure force of nature, will test his thoughts in reality unless he is restrained. I do not believe God restrains, and I do not believe man is able to do so for very long. So all people will sin. But with regards to even understanding the nature of sin, of anything? When the infant brain, containing the machinery for all logic, all emotion, all knowledge, all passion, every mental capability ever harnessed by any human being, is given over to a world of half-truths and misconceptions? How can the adult emerging from such an upbringing possibly differentiate between truth and fiction, when their "truth" has been defined by works of fiction?

From a very young age, I have been taught that truth is attainable, since all things are possible through him who strengthens me. That I should never give up on anything good, noble, or right, even if it seems impossible, because God is an omnipotent God, and he will deliver me. But I have come to see that whether or not I believe any given task to be good, noble, or right is completely dependent on what my surroundings have programed me to believe "good, noble, and right" things are. I have come to see that whatever divine advice or help might be offered me, in the realm of metaphysics, will inevitably be shrouded by conflicting "advice" and "help," thanks to my off-kilter programing that will leave off-kilter me to decide which is divine and which is not, and if either of the two even were in the first place. I have come to see that when I pray in times of conflict, in order that I may learn from God which is the right path to take, I will always be praying to something other than God because the God I pray to is and will always be an over-simplified figment of Reality. Of the true God. So, now, how must Truth be pursued? How can truth be attained? How could something as large as Truth possibly fit into a box weighing less than five pounds and made of a clump of tangled flesh? How could God possibly expect a people to pursue him by learning more? I don't think he does.

I grow increasingly more convinced that our standing with God is unaffected by our understanding of him. That our upbringing and education in regard to metaphysics will eventually become irrelevant. That there is nothing we can do about all the random little things that have screwed over our understanding, so there is little need to fret over them. That eventually, the struggle is simply one we must give up. The more I learn, the more I realize I have learned absolutely nothing, and the more it sinks in how damn little I know, the more obvious it becomes to me that God transcends all boundaries, including the ones separating one of our heads from another's. Even with the existence of an absolute truth, God cannot possibly favor one man's view over another, or one culture's over another, one time's. They are all so, so far away! We are all born so far away. Existence is not partial in the realm of understanding or philosophy. It knows too well that we do not.