Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 August 2010 21:05:18
I have too much time on my hands, as one of my friends told me when I commented that I had been reading up on Guatemalan Quaker worship. There are lots of things I should be doing, but all require myself to motivate myself, and self-motivation is something that I am much lacking at the moment. My brain therefore instead of thinking on things it should do, has felt that it should run free, start earthquakes, push at walls to see what happens, and generally cause as much chaos as possible. I have hinted at this in my previous two blogs this week. Following a conversation, which is best described as the final push in my thinking, I realised that what I meant by a word was not the same as the person using it, as it was something that to me had more significance than to most I struggled. This however sent my brain spinning down the how do we ever know that our meaning of words is the same as anyone. This led to lots of thinking about our everyday interactions, and our ability to hurt others without meaning to. But also took me to the how can we ever know anything about anything world. Including how can we ever know that anything we say is understood correctly, and that anything we hear/ read we have understood as the communicator expects us to? This lack of shared understanding becomes more difficult the more barriers such as different culture, social status, nationality and time that are in the communication. This then led me to a world where I renewed my questioning of how we could hope to overcome all these barriers when looking at the Bible. Also I then started to think about how we have to rely on others to help us, and how are we to know we are understanding then correctly, before we even start to understand there agenda? It probably didn’t help that a few weeks ago just for fun I had started reading about realist and anti-realist views of truth, and how this affects are view of God!