DO WE REALLY WANT TO KNOW?

If we knew for an absolute certainty (keeping in mind there is no such thing as an absolute of anything) that there was indeed a higher power, a God or gods of some sort, then where would the mystery in our lives go? Don't we need mystery and ambiguity to go about our day to day existence in our preceived realities? If the mystery of the Godly unknown is made available to all on the planet (assuming it's a digestible epistomology for all, which would be a ridiculous assumption) would that change how we interact in society, politics, gender, class and war? Would this reduction in diversity and plurality, made possible by the undisputed truth of a higher power (there is no such thing as the undisputed truth), make less dichotomous the tensions between mind & body, animal & human, nature & machine? I'm not sure that I want to know the answer that unveils the omniscience of a higher power. I like the unrevealed mystery. It's the mystery that allows for a space between belief and disbelief, natural and unnatural, political and apolitical. Donna Haraway in her "Cyborg Manifesto" sees no coincidence in the fact that "the symbolic system of the 'family of man'...breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex." Why? Because our undulating and modulating narratives continue to interact, intersect and intercede with unpredictable story arcs that challenge the perception of the difinitive and the essential, creating new combinations of the cultural, societal and political, definitions that will in turn be questioned and rethought. That wouldn't be possible if the world community shared an unflinching, absolute knowledge of God. That kind of rigidity and close-mindedness is the stuff of religious fundementalism and intolerance. If we had that knowledge then we as humans would be omniscient and therefore Gods ourselves. But to be human is to err, to be imperfect and filled with uncertainty. The challenge is not in the search for evidence of God or Gods, but in the more grounded task of learning how to live with ourselves, to understand the empirical world (to understand the optics of the empirical world) and even if its diverse ideologies and practices don't align with one another or with our own, at least we can be tolerant and even a bit humble in the shadow of the great Mystery.

Michael