Honesty

I find it difficult to be honest with myself. I blame the repercussions of modernity. Modern science and modern philosophy is skeptical of anything non-material, often intellectually negating the presence of the spiritual realm. This has created a culture that doesn’t see a need for God who is the source of existence. We only apprehend a need to interpret existence through the human mind, which leads us to rationalize our problems rather than bring them before God.

What have I just done? I have rationalized my problem. I took it in terms of my cultural context and found a place to lay the blame.

Let’s try again:

There are many reasons why it is difficult to tell myself the truth about me. The first glaringly obvious one is that I do not know the truth of myself. It is too big to take in at a glance. It sounds like a rather egocentric view, but in essence the part that is to big to grasp is our capacity for relationships. Our ability to view and interpret scientific or social relationships is something which makes us different from animals. In some ineffable way, we humans are linked to eternity—we also have a spiritual relationship. We have a relationship with the living God, whether we are aware of it or not. We may know nearly everything there is to know about the anatomy and chemistry of the human body, but many claim to know nothing about what happens after death. If the world continues for more eons, science will eventually exhaust its fields of research. What more can be known about living, and what more can be done to extend the length of our lives? But we can never come to the end of knowing God.

So I started with trying to know myself and ended with knowing God. It seems that if I really want to know the me beyond the atoms and electrical impulses, the person I need to know is God, who created me and knows me. Anyway, if God created everything, from the natural laws to the creatures governed by them, then there is no knowledge which is apart from God. I mean to say that God is the source of all knowledge, not that God is all knowledge in the pantheistic sense. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” etc.