The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

There is no such thing as “have to”. What is your ground(s) for saying that something “has to” be the case? We do come upon in this world where things work a certain way, and we continue on the basis that at least some of those functionings don’t change, and will continue to work in that manner. And you may ask, why do they work like that? One theory is that this might be the only way in which things can work: it “has to” be this way. There is no way to prove this is true. Nothing “has to” be as it has been; as it seems, sometimes, how things must be. Yes, it might be a facet of taking things for granted yet again. For one understands that given a circumstance, things have been observed to act in thusly. But what is the matrix for that circumstance, the matrix for that matrix, and on, and on? What ground(s) do you ultimately walk, along that path of (meta)logic?

Just because it doesn’t seem to make sense if, for instance, logic itself weren’t always logical, doesn’t mean logic “has to” be logical. Why does anything have to make sense to you? That’s inductive thinking, as is all logic or metalogic, when it comes down to it. Because it’s seemed to work a certain way from as far back as it has been recorded, doesn’t mean it “had to” be that way, nor that it “has to” be that way. But what if there is a purpose to all things, and how these things came to be? What if there is a Ground? Without such, we only have the logic of the “has to” to fall back on: it is because it is. (That actually may sound deep in some contexts. It isn’t.) One might turn to materialism as an escape, but this ends up invoking the anthropic principle: it is because, since we are here to observe it, it must be therefore so. This is trying to fill our stomachs up on the husk part of all the ears of corn.

The only way out of a chain of why’s without resorting to a meaningless solipsism is to believe in a transcendent Purpose. Otherwise, what we end up is a house of cards floating in space. And all that we can do is add more cards to that house, models building upon models, reasons relying on reasons. Yes, the material world can be taken “as is”, as some people purport is the highest of observation: to experience fully the moment. But without a why, how is person more than just an animal? Not that such experience is meaningless, per se. But what if we’re meant for something greater? We miss ourselves, then, if we look not to Purpose. It may not always make sense, at least not completely, and that is where faith comes in. Allows us to go in the way we should go.

Also, we can say that it is another astounding “coincidence” that things make sense at all. That we can rationally conceive of theories that model how certain things have worked, and continue to work. Astounding, because the models are not exact copies of what they model. Explain the concurrency of the theory and the reality and you have possibly the meaning of meaning. It is not a problem I have struggled much with, but I wager that it has to do with quality, or how things are perceived by us: if things did not make sense, quality could not, functionally, exist. Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” I think he may have understood what I’m talking about, even before we met in the HALOSPACE.