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Back in the nineteen eighties, the British Museum in London, England mounted an exhibition with the deserving title: FAKE, the art of deception. Fake, the Oxford dictionary remarks: to make presentable or plausible; alter to deceive; contrive out of poor or sham materials, feign, trick, spurious person or thing!The exhibition ran for a number of weeks and displayed over six hundred items from its collection, across a field of history, art, archaeology and even religion, with two so-called letters from Christ! All were once on open display to the pubic and assured by the most learned 'experts' to be true and genuine; only years later, could these fakes and forgeries be revealed and disavowed publicly; conveniently avoiding any institutional embarrassment and professional disgrace. Even today, as a new Indiana Jones adventure, "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", prepares to open, a Paris museum acknowledged last Friday that its own star exhibit, a crystal skull, was not what it was cracked up to be. FAKES are as much a part of the present as the past.
Whatever the real intentions of the exhibition; the obvious amusement at seeing so much intellectual fallibility on parade was more than sufficient entertainment for a visit. On reflection, the exhibit was a rare insight into human vanity, intellectual arrogance, greed, gullibility and dishonesty, a quite remarkable display of how easily high reason falls to its own hubris. But if those we expect to know better are so easily deceive themselves, where does that leave the rest of us?
One can leave such an exhibit feeling that susceptibility to self-deception and illusion is almost innate to human nature. Almost as if there was/is a bent to rational thought itself? A kink the enlightenment project has as yet failed to straiten. That may be why the process of discovery replacing error, evidence overcoming false opinion has been such a difficult, rocky, pot marked path towards even the incomplete progress humanity has made for itself.
Even with todays level of scientific prowess, certainty often remains elusive, problematic, relative. As the exhibition stated in its commentary: 'Scientific and curatorial expertise has its limits.' Unfortunately that has never stopped vain imagination taking reason hostage and dragging it well beyond itself.... and there the problems begin. Whatever the period of history, humanity exists 'momentarily' within whatever are the current limits of understanding. And because those limits will inevitably be surpassed in ways one cannot even now imagine, holding fast to any current position, while those same assumptions are coming under question and on the verge of passing into history by new discovery is a losing battle.
Whatever may be the potential of natural reason, progress, not to mention ethics, demands we conceive our thoughts to minimize the risk of FAKE. What is unique about the modern world is an approach to claims of knowledge that must pass through the crucible of scrutiny before being allowed to pass into practical use as dependable insight. What cannot be objectively scrutinized is suspect! There appears no other way to limit self-deception. Science exists because truth that is genuine is more often than not, a much more subtle reality than whatever abstract thought or logic can secure by itself.
Nowadays any premature claims to primary understanding runs the serious risk of global humiliation. Consider the case of 'cold fusion'. Ideas are better first refined by theory and hypothesis of what truth and knowledge might be until the means exists to conclusively test the underlying assumption. A judgement is searched for and evidence discovered [or not], which is the power of what truth does; the results being sustainable and reproducible by indepentent means. At the end is revealed understanding which can demonstrate its own efficacy and defend itself. Only then is the claim offered the accolade of being genuine and true.
This modern, secular scientific approach to our continuing search for progress is also at the heart of another unresolved conundrum which continues to cause divisions, frictions and conflict between peoples and nations. For there remain ancient claims to knowledge called true, which history has been unable to either verify or discard, claims that pre-exist the modern, more secure and reliable discipline of measuring the value of understanding. The source of conflict is between religious tradition and this secular conception of knowledge. The conflict is not with God, for self-evidently there is as yet no proof of that reality to arbitrate among so many and varied claims made in that name. The difficulty is with those who claim to speak for a potential reality, which continues to remain only a unproven possibility; demanding faith, deference and tithes, and having derived their license, not from any universally accepted basis of understanding, but from either the obscured origins of tradition or the theological study of scripture. A degree in theology, as the means to comprehend the mind of God, is no doubt the butt of particularly rude jokes in heaven.
The ideas which exist in the name of religion might have some plausibility, but observing the most religious/orthodox societies only confirms they are no more moral or enlightened or free from problems than any other culture. In fact they are often much worse as religious bigotry and arrogance quickly becomes its own tyranny. One needs only consider the current Mormon/poligamy/sexual abuse scandal. So where is the progress? Where is the beef? Had any religious or spiritual conception ever demonstrated itself as a solution to any of the many ills facing mankind or our planet, no dissent would be forthcoming. But sadly, history is written otherwise. Religious claims have come to constitute a source of difficulty the world could well do without, and by defending instead of questioning their ideas, have become an obstruction to the very peace of which they aspire.
If exploring, testing and understanding tangible, observable, material phenomena is fraught with difficulty; at least there is an occasional result, as applied understanding to improve the lot of human existence in this world. What results from speculations that have become sanctified and dogmatized about the intangible, invisible and spiritual have been written in the blood of history, both past and present.
Christian-Judeo scriptures in particular present several 'structural' problems to interpretation. First, they are liberally laced with warnings of FAKES. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library of Gnostic Gospels, only discovered last century, contain large tracts of warnings about error, deceptive and fraudulent teaching, anti-Christs etc. Such warnings presume the means must exist, to know the difference between what is true and what is FAKE. Thus a way to discover that difference must be the essence of what a revelation is and the nature of perfect truth.
Second: Scriptures frequently refer to the potential for a very profound confirmation of religious experience and justification of faith. Yet two thousand years of theological dispute and schism, nor three competing mono-theistic traditions have resolved the question. Lastly, what scriptures do speak of is a great humiliation for human 'worldly wisdom'. And scholastic theology founded in philisophical principles must top the bill of that suggestive heading?
Start from square one and try to conceive of religion, not as understood by any tradition, but as the revelation of new ethical insight. One that could set mankind on a path of new moral growth and maturity, as it becomes increasingly clear that humanity seems incapable of addressing or resolving the gravest and most threatening problems facing the modern world. Is not this more honest and interesting to imagine? For if our planet is indeed the creation of the Lord God, he alone must hold the key to the spiritual nature and moral conception of sustainability.
With the most recent scriptural discoveries and so much new material to explore, examine and consider. What is very plausible is that relying on an incomplete scriptural record, and setting their own theological ideas on the nature of a revelation and the sacred in concrete, tradition may have decieved themselves, corrupted their own mission and missed the most important of insights.
The very idea that a perfect truth, a living, immutable proof of God might exist by some as yet unknown and undiscovered path of faith sounds unsettling to minds conditioned by traditions where God does nothing or to those who have grown up with a faith in modern secular thought and blasphemy to those whose self interest exists in preserving the religious status quo. But it is not contrary to the scriptural record, and if anyone were dreaming of paradigm shift in human consciousness that might accomplish for the future what existing reason, politics and tradition have all failed to deliver, such as lasting peace, the end of conflict, a greater more certain justice and more solid, sustainable values, then the idea doesn't sound quite as preposterous any more!
Whether interpretative theology is a valid human endeavour; whether religious tradition based upon these same human interpretations and assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality are true or an intellectual Fake, a comforting cultural myth, overblown by its own pretensions, history may be getting ready to decide. All traditions make claims, but without the ability to clearly demonstrate any true divine wisdom, they resolve nothing, encourage only prejudice and remain devisive forces within society. !
The ideals of religion remain laudable, but apparently too high for theology and tradition to fully comprehend or secure. If God is to be the source of ones spiritual aspirations, he should be able to offer an unambiguous way and means to define and realise those ends. It is often said religion does not belong to a domain open to proof or disproof by scholarship or science. That may very well be the case, but if by acting within the criteria for truth understood by the modern world, testing for an experience of ultimate, transcendent power, faith may still hold a surprise! The bodkin to prick that intellectual bubble may even now be on the web and if it blows, make sure your not downwind! http://www.energon.org.uk
