Knowlege

How do people know things?  Have you ever thought about how we become aware of where a tree's branches become sky?  Or where a house abutts a tree?  Or where the sidewalk starts?  In thinking about these things which we take for granted everyday, it amazes me that we can feel certain of anything!  We walk on the ground with confidence that our next step will fall on solid ground because we have felt it before.  We know the Earth is below us waiting to catch our fall.  But what if we didn't know?  What if we did not rely on our past experiences; the wisdom accrued through years of skinned knees and whacked "funny" bones?  Wouldn't we be lost in a sea of meaningless sensory input?  So why, when it comes to spirituality, do we cast our senses aside and opt to believe in .... what, the "unsensed"?  The unseen?  Untouched?  Unsmelled?

I can hear my believer friends all chiming in at the same time now...  "What do you mean, unsensed?  I sense the hand of God in all things!  Don't YOU sense it in the beauty and order of the cosmos?". Well, truthfully... no, I don't.  I don't "sense" anything remotely like that.  I do, however, recognize beauty and ugliness.  I acknowledge kindness and cruelty.  I cherish love and despise hatred.  Cherish.  Acknowledge.  Recognize.  All of these words describe human abilities --sensation-like, but not "senses".  And as with our senses, we learn to trust these abilities too.  But what happens when we consider how these abilities compare with our senses.  While I can point to a bird and compare the details of that image with my sighted friends, I find that if I try to do that with beauty, the details we each describe may be very different.  Why then do we look to find commonality in the concept of a God?  Do we desire to find shared perception in our subjective abilities as well as our physical sensory experiences?  I think maybe we do.  I think  that many of us shutter at the thought of "to different from me" ideas.  It exacerbates our sense of isolation - a painful reminder of the human condition.

The Oxford New American Dictionary offers the following definition of "know" -- to "be aware of through observation, inquiry, or information.". How do the words "Acknowledge", "Recognize", and "Cherish" compare with "Observation", "Inquiry", and "Information"?  My mind seems to think that the first set is more subjective than the second, but my believer friends often speak of knowing the "Truth".  How can these two approaches to "Truth" be reconciled?  I'm not sure they can be.  Some people are more comfortable with relying on the subjective than the objective, and vice-versa.  Why, I do not know.  I do not know how anything subjective can be universally true, as many would wish.  I wish that I had a crystal ball so I could know the "Truth", but I find I can only come back to my objective sensations combined with my subjective perceptions, and those, I'm afraid, I cannot be so bold as to define as "Truth" for all mankind.  I only wish my believer friends would (or could) afford the same generosity to me and my other non-believer friends.  Were that true, there might be considerably less strife in the world.