The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

Once you trust the right things, you have got the key to what is true, and what is real. You trust that you exist, and it is right to do so, for reality works in no other way, as far as you can possibly tell. Yes, it is possible and conceivable to doubt your own existence, but it is generally of limited use. And this is what Descartes missed: if you can trust that you exist, when you can doubt that you exist, much follows from this leap of faith. For from there, you can tell that you exist in the body you must inhabit, for the sense that is your “I am” is very like of the same caliber as trusting your other senses. All your senses are the way you have learned that you yourself exist, in fact, as far back as your memory goes. (Even further, probably.) Then you may believe in the physical world, for such perception works in a way consistent with how you have observed yourself, and there have been things you learned about the world that is consistent with your sensations. So far so good.

Now we get to the hard part. You learn to trust in logic, you may even tie them to what your senses trust. Logic you know from your observations to be trustworthy, pretty much as much as you can trust your senses, perhaps even as far as trusting your own existence. Then you have come to reason. You can trust certain things, now, that you have only been told about, but because they are consistent with how you have observed things work, you can use information as an extension of your own senses. How about that? Now, we can jump tangentially: how about miracles? Because people say that they have seen the miraculous, so can you believe just one account of them: if so, do you then believe in miracles? Because then, we come back full circle: for I tell you that everything is a miracle, down to your own very existence. Trust that, and you’re ready for honest to goodness faith. Because now, you can believe in love.