Knowledge and Belief: Reality and Morality Police

Believing a thing doesn't make it true. We have to act on beliefs, but what a sweet world it would be if we all recognized (one of the few sure things) that our private, subjective belief-acts don't impose limits on the objective universe.

Simple precepts: Don't believe what you think. Don't "know" what you believe. You are one drop: respect the ocean.

A few weeks ago, this old Facebook post of mine came up on the annual rotation, and I reposted it on two religious opinion sites. I got a surprising number of responses and answered some of them. It turned out to be futile. Most responders weren't interested in exchanging ideas, but on attacking, even at the expense of misunderstanding. My comment particularly freaked out an apocalyptic Texan with an evangelical podcast but only one Facebook friend. 

After a few exchanges, he called me "easily one of the most confused men I have ever met" (for which distinction I thanked him) and described my posts as "pure gibberish," praise of which I am unworthy. I couldn't achieve pure gibberish while using English words grammatically. When a less ironic writer than me supported me, he told her, ^"You are blinded by your hatred of truth and reason" and accused her of "libel" for calling him intolerant. The discussion went nowhere, of course, but it did make me expand on my repost, some of which I'll share here, hoping for a more receptive audience--or, at least, sharing the astonishing polarities of thought I encountered.

One respondent disagreed with my assumption that an "objective universe" existed outside of belief. 

"Objective universe?  Where did you get that stupid idea?" he inquired. I suppose this was a rhetorical flourish. Complete denial of non-subjective reality is called solipsism, associated more with insanity than with philosophy. Of course, people do go overboard and confuse their perceived reality with the real thing, but, since Kant, a distinction is well recognized. There are, of course, multiple meanings of the word objective. It might mean from no point of view, but that describes almost nothing. Maybe the idea of a triangle or a formula representing a 3-D object can be said to exist without a point of view, but the moment anybody becomes aware of it, that changes. Objective might even mean from God's point of view, but an human approach to that in the world is from some individual person's point of view. 

The only really usable meaning, I think, of objective is a modest one: an objective reality is one that any number people of all kinds (at least in theory) can attest to. It isn't personal. It appears whenever background conditions are met, regardless of beliefs. In 2019, I defined Kalashnikov Truth in terms of the recognition shared by Communists and Jihadists in 1980s Afghanistan that AK-47s kill better than swords. Even as they embraced centuries-old customs, the Mujahideen carried Soviet rifles because they were objectively more lethal.¹ 

This time, I gave a milder example. Suppose that a crowd of people of all kinds is in the middle of a big, open field without rain gear. Among them are men, women, children, transsexuals and cisgender. They represent all religions and skepticisms. They are tall and short, from many nations. They are able and handicapped, sighted and blind, just and unjust. A sudden rainstorm comes up. Every person in the field will get wet. Their beliefs, origins, and attitudes have nothing to do with it. The falling water is objectively real, independent of subjective attitudes such as beliefs, origins, or capacities.The sum of all events of this kind I call the objective universe.

Of course, we never directly experience the objective universe. In our experience, it is constructed from subjective data. The guy who challenged me is correct in that sense: "You're talking about the illusions that your created mind is processing from invisible vibrations. I teach anyone who is interested in how they are created within ME, the ONLY ONE who enables them to speak, see, hear, smell, taste, feel emotions and various senses of touch. Without ME, nothing would exist. There is no real universe. It's just an illusion that looks real but isn't." But rain still wets him. And it will wets others after he dies. It wets "without ME."

Most of the hypothetical but obviously real objective universe exists outside of our awareness. Nobody is able to construe more than a tiny bit of it, and many aspects of the rainstorm (such as how “bad” it is) are quite subjective. Our universe of experience is fundamentally subjective. The objective universe as we know it is a construct, but is distinguished by its generality. If I were on the field and felt a sensation of falling wetness but nobody else did, I would reasonably doubt that the rain was real. Anybody looking for Cartesian certainty here will be frustrated. We have access to what is objectively out there only through our limited senses and intelligence, seen through a glass darkly, but it is absurd, even suicidal, to deny it. If I quit eating I starve. If I jump off a high bridge, I die. A reality out there impacts my body regardless of our beliefs. That was an assumption of my post, if not its main point.

A main target of my post is people who, believing on the basis of sectarian teachings--what a preacher or old book tells them--create laws that force their beliefs on others. They deny the cultural premise that they live in a secular nation where many fellow citizens disagree with them. They use police as troops in neighborhood wars of religion. Typically these beliefs are not about anything even remotely objective, but are imposed as if they were--as if private sectarian beliefs defined the real universe, creating objective realities.

If I am an abortion doctor jailed for that reason, this is an objective consequence, as real as rain. When human personhood begins, the basis of anti-abortion laws, is not objective fact². If it were, there would be informed consensus. It would fall like rain on everyone who honestly paid attention. In reality, it is based on highly subjective cultural assumptions, typically religious ones. One of my targets is people who use objective violence to force others who don't share their religion to act as if they do. I lament people who impose the moral theology of their sect on people who have chosen not to join it. They use objective violence to impose their subjective beliefs on unbelievers.

¹https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/10/kalashnikov-truth.html 

²https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2022/02/when-does-life-begin-paradox.html