Skip to main content

truth has a small "t"

Looking back, my tracks have come this long way through religion, not exactly from this old Norwegian Stave Kirche, but something more like this one, below, on the island where our father was born.  
Precisely that one.
I have been there.

 King Olav Tryggvason built a wooden church there in the year 998, when Christianity was introduced to Norway, and Norway said "How are things going?".

 Later, King Olaf II convened at Moster, declaring that Norway was converting to Christianity.  The current building, pictured, was probably built on the original church site in about 1150.  

 That sealed my fate.  We started with Nordic myths and gods, hitched our wagons to Christianity, and became Lutherans about 500 years ago.  

 A lot of my relatives are buried there.  A cousin, showing me the church and grounds, pointed to a headstone with a round hole in it, saying he thought it was a marker for an unbeliever, affording parishioners a chance to spit through the stone, to show their contempt and great faith.  
I thought it best not to try to explain myself in halting Norwegian, lest someone bore a hole through me.  

 It is not really Norway, or my own drafty headstone I have in mind:  it is how we know what we know.

 Religions of the sort I was born into, are patriarchal, and authoritarian.  We had a pretty good idea of what the truth was:  the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.  One way of understanding the Reformation that made Christians into Catholics on one side, and Protestants on the other, was a dispute about how we got at that truth.  One side tended to affirm that the Bishops of the church guarded the truth, and the other side became book-centered:  the Bible.  Today, that once-clearer distinction has become muddy.  In either case, God was Truth, and revealed the Way and the Truth and the Life to us.  

 It was patriarchal family blown large.
It was monarchy blown large.
It still is.  
God is male, so is Jesus.
So were his disciples, and priests.
Men were the head of the family.
God was King.  We were servants of the King.
Apparently the King was caucasian, too.

 It is rumored that there still are people who want a Strong Man to lead us,
to tell us what to do, to take messy matters into his own hands and make us great again.  I suppose it is something like saying, "It says in the Good Book. . . ."

 Well, ask people what their final, absolute authority is.  
They will probably not say, "The Constitution!"
They will probably not say, "We are, together!"
If push comes to shove. . . .

 The genius and the glory of science is that ideas are something less than absolute:  they are just the best we know.  And everyone knows that better ideas will emerge from testing what we know against what we are continuing to learn.  truth has a small "t".  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more