Felix … the way I see it … we do base our life on ultimate ignorance … whether we are willing to admit it or not.
We are playing the game of life without a full deck of cards.
So it seems. The Scientific American article illustrated for me how little we know of ultimate reality. So, to suppose that we live in knowledge of where we come from, or where we are going or even how it is that we are here at this moment is a mistake. As long as that is the case, it seems to me it would be reasonable to live in the constant awareness of the ultimate mystery of existence.
K: I believe that what we see is the ultimate reality… we like to think that there
is some onion thing going on with reality and we haven’t peeled open the “real” reality but
the fact is, we have…there is no mystery, no “ultimate” reality to find… we are already
in the only reality that exists…look about you… this is it…and for some reason, we can’t accept
that this is the only reality we have…and the only one we are going to find…
deal with that reality kids…
Kropotkin
Amen … with a mellow heart!!
Peter … for me the mystery Felix refers to is the “stuff” on the other side of the ‘veil’ … yeah ultimate reality permeates our existence … and some may have imagined IT correctly … no one has proven it … with any degree of certainty.
If we truly could “see” all … there would be no further inspiration/motivation for the pursuit of philosophy, science or religion.
While reading this all I could think of was: nothing new under the sun. The condition you describe is not new. In the first century for example, "god fearers " would court various gods. No religion which I am aware of has had a god which was not contradictory or paradoxical.
The post modern condition is a return to a default condition which was only alleviated by arbitrary means, by force. Without this option you have the variety of opinions about god we see today. I’m not saying that god is meaningless or that it means different things to different people all of the time because we do have communities which use the word in a somewhat consistent way. That said there are different communities with their own meaning
Or use of the word god.
The interesting part of postmodernism, what might be new, is that the will of the individual is king in our day. The desire to belong is declining (whether that’s a fact or a linguistic fashion) and so god’s meaning is left to the personal tastes of individuals. Although this is the philosophical consequence of postmodernism, I believe that the communal instinct in all of us means that the majority shy away from the enormous responsibility of defining what god is for them.