Two Wrongs, Too Writes

Nov 30, 2021

It’s often said that two wrongs don’t make a right but why is it that we all assume that two rights can not be so. And I’m not talking about a world where there is no truth. I’m referring to the complexity of information and perspective. Maybe the transcendentalists were right. But also, maybe the theists and traditional religious folk were right too. Maybe there is a great deal of “truth” in the world and although no one single perspective or worldview encapsulates it perfectly, maybe there is truth in all of them. Maybe there is no perfect path to perfect understanding. I think I know that to be true for myself. My deepest learned truths came from my profound ability to do and think wrong. Much like the law was given to mankind not as a guideline of perfection, but as a wayfinder to draw light to our wrong. Our mistakes teach us much more than our righteousness. I feel God knew this when he presented the law to Moses and his people. It was not a way for people to attain righteousness, but to identify and draw light onto their wrongdoing so that they could learn to be better. Because perfection was not achievable. That wasn’t the truth they needed to learn, but we can all “do better”, and that is a truth that meets us where we are and grows with us. It is different for everyone, yet it is the same truth. And this comes into this complexity of multiple truths can still be true and still provide for a unifying truth but in the same breath be perceived very differently. This thinking has caused me to form a new belief in response to this possibility. Someone asked me which scripture was most important to follow and I responded, “all of it”. Everything is important. We tend to create hierarchies in our minds to triage information. We do this to make things easier on us, to know what to focus on or to prioritize what we are able to retain. But our inability to be omniscient doesn’t determine the value of some ideas over others. We can’t always hierarchy truth or put a value to spiritual thinking. So if we approach truth seeking with the idea that,

  1. Truth is found everywhere.
  2. All truth is important and valuable

Then the question becomes what truth do we pursue? The answer, to me, is the one in front of you. In every moment of the day, in every situation, if you seek the truth, you will find it. If you immensely value truth, you will gain a return from pursuing it. Any time we close our eyes and ears to something because we have labeled it false or we believe we had to hold one truth over another, we have limited our ability to be exposed to and transformed by truth.

So two wrongs definitely don’t make anything right. But maybe, and I do say maybe because this is a value and idea that is very new to me… but maybe two truths that appear in conflict to us are only in conflict because of our perspective or the corruption in our hearts that prevents us from seeing how many truths entangle together into a beautiful grand truth. What the transcendentalists called zen or nirvana, and what the religious and fervent refer to as the knowledge of God. Now hear me out, this does not mean that “all faiths lead to God”, but more that all faiths pursue truth and those deep truths of reality and existence reflect God. All deep thoughts worthy of meditation, but I would be neglecting my calling to not point to Jesus, who claimed to be the fulfillment of truth and the one and only way to a relationship with God. Many faiths and truths may reveal aspects of grand truth and God, but if you want a relationship with God and don’t want to call Jesus a liar, then I highly recommend looking to Jesus and His teachings.

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