Open Your Eyes and Your Mind

I stand among those totally baffled by my colleagues, many learned, many experienced, progressive and conservative alike. Chicken Little lives! The sky IS falling and it's not my fault … it's theirs! There is a fog of fantasy clouding the world in which we live. Any conspiracy voiced must have a grain of truth. There is an inexplicable rejection of science and a refusal to absorb overwhelming evidence and fact. Have we returned to the days when the church refused to recognize the proof of heliocentrism simply because it threatened their power? Fossils were laid down by God to trick us. Seriously? The universe, some 13 billion years old, larger and more complex than anything we can imagine was created by God as supporting background only 4,000 years ago. Ya Think? I can only shake my head so much before I get a headache that Tylenol will not relive.

I intend to write a series of posts that will lay out some of the crazy s..t that is flowing, like a poisonous mist, around these days. Hurricanes in California because the government didn't close the border? Israeli space lasers? COVID 19 a plot by Democrats to seize control? Oy veh ist mir! To get an idea of where I think we might start, please read this quotation from a book published in the 1970s. I found that it gave me insight into the problem.

"… are you not bumping up against a stone wall, the will not to believe? The will not to believe! It's nothing new to me. I met it on deathbeds. I hear it in the confessional. I hear it from deceived husbands, from parents whose sons are missing in action, from trapped bankrupts. The will not to believe. It is simple human nature. When the mind cannot grasp or face up to a horrible fact, it turns away, as though (the act of) refusing credence will conjure away the reality. That is what you are encountering."

The quotation is from War and Remembrance, by Herman Wouk, Chapter 18, in which Father Martin is discussing the absolute refusal of U.S. officials, in 1942 to believe the facts about the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question', despite being presented with an official German document describing the horrors that await the Jews. The novel is fiction. The refusal of our government to recognize and to act is fact. How many millions died because we didn't have the will to believe? That we will never know.

Stick with me during this series. I know that friends and acquaintances will accept my commentary or not. They will accuse me of heresy or applaud my insight. What I really want my readers to do is to think for themselves. Don't believe Fox News, or the evangelical voice shouting damnation. You can listen to them. They have a voice. But they don't have a set of stone tablets given them by God, if that would be possible.

Use that grey matter. That, God did give you. Ask questions. Somewhere between Steven Hawkings, Neil Tyson deGrasse, the Pope, Siddhartha, and Robert Shuler lies the truth. Mother Nature is talking … Listen! In our existence, where planets that can support the miracle of life are numbered in millions, among galaxies numbered in billions, facts with which we cannot dispute, lies reality. You don't have to seek it. But please don't deny it for the simple reason that you will it not to be.

See you in the next post.