Posted by
Reason & Free Inquiry on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 9:15:32 PM
"You cannot produce rational intuition by argument, because argument depends upon rational intuition." - C.S. Lewis
It is an amazing contradiction that we live in. A world that shouts "tolerance" and "idividuality" and "freedom of thought" but when one truly looks at it, such battle cries of the "modern", "diverse" world are red herrings. What the world really demands is uniformity. But uniformity to what?
Uniformity to a train of thought, or rather "unthought". It strikes me funny that we are in such an intellectual age - any bit of information can be gotten in seconds' time because of techonology, but the prominence of any "real thinking" or "real reasoning" is so lacking.
This world doesn't desire us to actually think for ourselves. Rather, it desires that we "think" we are thinking. And that is the delusion we must be aware of. I recently read an article that stated children are no longer "taught knowledge" but are "facilitated in their learning". Faciliated in their learning of what? If the focus has switched from WHAT we are learning to simply HOW we learn it, then it no longer matters what we learn - only that we are made to feel competent that we CAN learn.
And in a world that denies absolutes, there can be no passing on of knowledge, because the entire concept of knowledge then becomes subjective; able to be conformed to the whim of the knowledge-giver. Who is to say what is really "knowledge" and what is not? The best we can offer is to assist people in "learning" how to be impressionable bowls of mush; automatons regurgitating what has been programmed into their systems. The exercising of the God-given gift of reasoning is stunted, numbed, cut off to wither away into nothing.
This is what is so disturbing to me about the world today. In fact, I don't know what is more disturbing a) that people don't realize that they are letting their sense of reason die off or b) that they just don't care to do the work to fine tune it. Either way, does it really matter which is worse? They both lead to the same dismal destination: tyranny and enslavement. And there is nobody to blame but ourselves.
.