Questions bigger than your dreams

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored".
Aldus Huxley.

As I mentioned in my last posting, this week saw a very engaging debate drop on You Tube. It's been interesting to see how the discussion has developed following this, especially in respect to some very pertinent points that Glen Scriviner raised in this follow up piece.

You always know when something good along these lines is furnishing fresh considerations, because it easily raises more thoughts and new questions in your own mind.

As you'll see from the above links, Matt Dillahunty doesn't know if the manner of humanism he is seeking to advocate can provide in any enduring sense, a better world for everyone, so that raises a key point - should it, then, really be a competing, valid world-view? Why, if it cannot give hard and beneficial results, should it be given a precedent role in a society?

Glen showed in the debate that numerous studies have already shown religion to be quantitively beneficial for people. Jordan Peterson, in a similar discussion, touched on how, even amidst atheists, religion is a 'de-fault' form of behaviour, not just morally, but in respects of seeking to give meaning to their existence in what they are doing, so on these evidential grounds alone, shouldn't religion by deeply valued, not rejected?

This, of course, is just touching the threshold of the richer value of what religion is seeking to open concerning the true meaning of being human and how we all stand on the cusp of something so much greater than the material, but our own all too human limitations so often hold us back from stepping into the truth (even when there are so many 'fingerprints' to indicate that we should).

Truth dares us to step into a much larger world than we often see at the mundane level we allow ourselves to inhabit most of the time.

This last few weeks has prompted and prodded me to re-engage with the arts and nature - to take notice of the beauty that requires our full attention. One of the realms I've been thinking over is wild swimming - how city people are rediscovering their links to a very different world by literally immersing themselves in an environment that jolts a response and genuinely benefits those involved from doing so.

Encountering and engaging with the wealth of the real world, as Roger Scruton would have put it, prompts a desire in us for something deeper - a longing for connection, for...home.

Humanism, in its better voices, is seeking that same journey, but as this debate shows, the road signs are being miss-read.

Jesus Christ shows us those points (our failure, His sufficiency) that return us to the necessary "map references" to take us where we need to go. That's the true wealth we need to inherit, here and forever.