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Truth, my friends, is not like many seem to think it is. Neither Brian nor you can treat Truth like a buffet, wherein we can choose what appeals to our personal palate. Nor can we logically say choices do not matter, as though Truth can be reduced to a buffet wherein whatever we want is equally delicious and nutritious.
Often what appeals to the human palate does so only because it is the path of least resistance, the choice that causes the least pain and most pleasure, or at least a sense of security in the crowd. Others choose truths from the motive of simply adopting what their peers claim to be true. Indeed, many of your peers might prefer you be right in their estimation than modeling integrity in your seeking. Groups often prefer, to guard against confusion and instability, and to promote self-preservation, affirmation of truths above loyalty to Truth, which leads to an inner contradiction in which integrity loses out to popularity.
Truth costs us. I know. It has costs me many times, and still does, sometimes. Can you imagine what it is like to preach on Sundays? One has given many years to seeking Truth in quality schools, continues seeking Truth daily, with integrity and diligence, and have many, sometimes almost all, who claim to be listening to you, who claim they want you to preach the Truth as best you can see it and, at the same time, they have no openness to consider you might be right in anything which differs with what they came to Worship already believing to be true? Odd.
I recall, when I considered, several years ago, returning to my native religious group, how I faced a moment of Truth. I had to decide to follow Truth, or not, to be faithful, or be faithless.
I was serving a small group of churches in the United Methodist Church. I thought it might be wiser to try to return to my native religious communion. I decided to find out what that would entail. I wrote a note to the Area Missionary, who was overseer of the area churches. He replied with a note. Though I was ordained many years earlier, had preached and served in varied pastoral roles in that communion for some twenty years, had gotten all my education in its schools, had been a religion professor in one of its schools, a new stipulation had been introduced, outside the vows of my ordination. Now, even to be helped by the Convention in being placed in a congregation as pastor, I would have to affirm belief in the infallibility of the Bible. I took the note and threw it in the trashcan. I did it, not because I did not have a high view of Scripture. I did it because I knew I could not have integrity and believe in something that Scripture itself, common sense, or reason, Church tradition, nor experience had affirmed to be true.
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So, experiences like the one above are reasons I do not take lightly exercising integrity, or my being alerted to persons who treat Truth as a relative matter that should just help us all get along, nicely, and costs us nothing in the process. Likewise, such experience has helped form within me a distaste for the easy, largely unexamined, believing that often goes under the Name of God.
Compassion is not agreeing to whatever anyone wants to think, nor claiming others should respect anything you or I think. Such agreement is facile, even if well intended, and not an expression of Wisdom. Such communities tend to become filled with persons who say or shout the same thing, while the lack of openness to sincere doubt and faithful differences itself leads both its leaders and followers to a dishonesty which is seen as faithful agreement. This looks like persons who assume the accumulation of agreement is the same as the affirming of Truth. And, persons huddle in thoughtless masses, fearing the potential personal consequences of faithful dissidence. But, what is agreement, if a mature man or woman is agreeing out of fear of reprisal or reward, even if the reprisal is the pain that ensues from choosing the less popular path or the reward is the security of being validated by the majority?
Do we want to live in a world where no one differentiates between all the claims to Truth, in a universal-like niceness, one which the Buddhist Master, Chōgyam Trungpa Rinpoche rightly called idiot compassion? Certainly, neither do we want to live in a world where differences are annulled in a group-like, blind faith, where all just sign on the line, thank you. We do not want to return to placing in prison or burning so-called heretics. But, do we want to live in a world where persons claim belief or no belief, and neither is willing to dare thorough examination to test what she claims as true? And, a thorough test of Truth is not a test before those whom you know will affirm your claims as true. That is no test, whatsoever.
The human, certainly, has more dignity than to believe mindlessly or reject belief with the same mindlessness. Both are expressions of the same extreme. Both are expressions of a like fundamental dread of surrender to that Something, or Someone, larger than oneself, to which one owes life and duty, and integrity, likewise. Rather, fundamentalists dread the dangers of diversity; and liberals dread the danger of conformism. Both, in their own ways live in extremes, both in an underlying dread.
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