My mom's dad told me that before he joined the Navy, he knew the Earth was round, but he didn't really believe it. The first time he saw a ship on the horizon rise straight out of the water, he believed in the curvature of the Earth in a way he never had before.
When I was in college, I took a physics class in which we learned about light in mathematical detail. I understood the concepts well enough to manipulate them. I could explain it, and I could analyze it. I could do the math. I didn't really believe it until I performed an experiment that only made sense if light propagates in waves. My eyes grew wide. Light! Is in waves! For days afterward, I raved to my friends about my revelation.
There are things we know but don't really believe.
People fear death—even people who think there is an afterlife and that they'll be happy there. They don't really believe in their afterlife.
Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die.
This is a point I saw best made in Tuesdays with Morrie (which, as I recall, was absent from the movie version, so read the book). Everyone knows they're going to die, but few really believe it. People who believe they'll die do not behave the way most people behave.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this except to say that it's one challenge of life to reconcile knowledge with belief. Often times I know what I think without knowing what I believe. When it comes to simple binary questions ("will you die?"), it seems obvious that knowledge and belief can be in direct conflict, not merely a little uncoordinated.
1 comment:
Well said; great analogy. It seems that using denial as a coping mechanism is viewed negatively by "society" but most of the time I can think of no other way to deal with the issue of death. If you can't blindly accept the concept of an afterlife, little stops the "afterlife" thought process from drifting towards "well what if there isn't?" It's depressing.
Equally depressing is trying to wrap one's brain around the concept of the "end" or your being. We think we understand the concepts of nothingness and eternity, as in when you die you just stop, and there's an eternity of nothingness, but there is no real way to understand the idea that everything your brain creates (personality, feelings, awareness) stops. As I try to wrap up this ramble, it is tempting to be reassured that when you're dead, you can't be upset about it because it is impossible to be upset; it is impossible to be anything. But since that concept is so far from anything a living person can experience, it is depressing.
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