"Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"
Once when I was a child and had a question my mother couldn't answer, I told her I was going to ask God when I died. For years afterward I kept a sort of running list in my head of things I was going to ask (too bad I never thought to write any of them down.)
Even though I stopped living in dread of the Christian afterlife sometime before I started high school, I still unconsciously believed that I WOULD get the real answers in some kind of post-mortem debrief. Existentialist philosophy in college led me to reluctantly abandon that hope, too, if a little wistfully.
This weekend someone threatened me with damnation of my eternal soul, and I laughed. Not much of a threat, is it? But it made me ponder for a moment what I would actually be willing to risk my immortal soul for, what could possibly be worth being damned.
What would I rather have than Paradise? To perceive the whole pattern at once, and to Understand.
Even though I stopped living in dread of the Christian afterlife sometime before I started high school, I still unconsciously believed that I WOULD get the real answers in some kind of post-mortem debrief. Existentialist philosophy in college led me to reluctantly abandon that hope, too, if a little wistfully.
This weekend someone threatened me with damnation of my eternal soul, and I laughed. Not much of a threat, is it? But it made me ponder for a moment what I would actually be willing to risk my immortal soul for, what could possibly be worth being damned.
What would I rather have than Paradise? To perceive the whole pattern at once, and to Understand.