blackwire

Reply...and other things

I'm really writing this blog entry to drop a reply to dear biopro, cos she's too noob to have a comments link on her blog. LOL :P

Anyway, it was as enjoyable for me as it was for you, maybe even more so, to talk about the stuff we did. And also thank you for staying up so late listening to my crap and all that, considering that half the time I wasn't even very coherent in my arguments. Go read more!! Then we can discuss more...Disclaimer: Honestly right, I haven't read most of the stuff I talked to you about (LOL!), its more like a random assortment of things mashed together from all over the place. (I've had Hegel's Philosophy of History for two years, and its just been sitting on my shelf staring back at me for two years!) Bottom line is, I'm certainly not as well read as you think I am la. Eh anyway ar, discussing all this stuff on MSN is really damn difficult man, give me a chance to do it face to face and I'll do a better job, :P

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On to other stuff:

I've kinda been having a difficult time these last few days. Its one of those occasions when all sorts of questions just jump up out of the blue and start attacking you. This time round, the questions had a more...shall we say, spiritual (religious?) slant. For a couple of years now, I've stopped going to church. There are a number of reasons, one (and perhaps the strongest) reason is because I think I've simply lost it. IT. FAITH.

What is faith? I've never been able to come across a particularly satisfying explanation or definition. More often than not, the people that I've spoken to will struggle to answer such a question. Some say its a "feeling", that if you have it you'll "know that its there". Essentially, all these attempts to define it point to one thing, faith is something intangible, something that cannot be explained by rational thought. We may be able to talk about how it manifests itself, how "proof" of its existence can be garnered through our experiences, but we never seem to be able to accurately pinpoint with an level of certainty what it actually is.

Faith often marks the end of reason. It calls for an acceptance that no matter how hard we try to answer "why" questions, we are not going to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. In short, it is a phenomenon that cannot be explained. All attempts that have tried to reconcile faith with reason (St. Augustine, and then St. Thomas Aquinas and many others) all have their shortcomings and even during the Enlightenment, when Reason was prized above all else, when the Philosophes wrote piece after piece in arguably the most intellectual century in human history, they were unable to reach any proper conclusion without making basic assumptions, assumptions that no matter how logical or natural they may, are assumptions nevertheless, meaning to say that it leaves a fairly large possibility that those assumptions may be wrong.
(Read Carl Becker's Heavenly City of The Eighteenth Century Philosophers)

So if Reason is inadequate to explain the world, to anchor our lives to something, what's left is essentially Faith. There is really no doubt in my mind that there exists somewhere a higher being. No other explanation will suffice. There is this need to believe in a higher being, but so far, it hasn't really happened. The need is there, the will, I feel, is there; unfortunately, the means are not. Or at the very least, I do not know how.

"Show me the door, and I'll open it." That has been one of the phrases that I've been muttering to myself time and again, in the hope that one day, it will happen. Without this, I am quite lost.