It's laughable when you think about the condition humanity finds itself in: we have no idea how we got here, who we are, or where we are going. We have conflicting assumptions that lead to individualized quests for meaning. What are the characteristic responses to this unknown? Let's check it out.People take various paths when facing the Mystery that is existence:
1) The Ostriches bury their heads in the sand. The sand can take the form of materialism, gossip, mindless entertainment, and indulgence. Like their bird counterparts, they adopt the chicken approach and run in the direction of denial. They seem to still live under the juvenile belief system that says if I can't see you, you can't see me. A game of hide and seek that lasts a lifetime - meaning never finds them, and they never find meaning. Well done, you um...win. I'm not meaning to criticize the birds, it's just that they often end up getting eaten by the void of regret, and I want to make myself as untasty a morsel as I can for that beast!
2) The Fundamentalists fight for a set of beliefs. None of the fun, all of the mental. In a way they are more noble than the ones who refuse to pick a side 'cos "Better hot or cold than luke warm; the luke warm will get spat out of the mouth of God"...type thing. The problem is that if these belief systems arent based on a combination of rational and experiential enquiry, they stem from emotionality and theory respectively. The emotion-driven need to attack those who believe differently than us stems from an insecurity that our ideas might turn out to be wrong. God is big enough to defend Himself, and the desperate approach to resort to injustice to defend Him is a self-depreciating irony.
3) The Yes people believe in everything. They believe that truth is relative and hey, if it works for you, then it's true. Pantheism, Theism, Agnosticism...yip, all true. "It's narrow minded to deny someone their belief system". Well the self-defeating argument is evident: if it's narrow minded to deny someone their belief system, then it is narrow minded to deny Fundamentalists theirs.
Oh you might think I'm on this high and mighty rant, criticizing the above stereotypes and that I'm finally gonna launch into an obnoxious set of reasons why my way of approaching things is the best. Ya, I'm just not :)
