Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

‘theory of everything’ is really about. Something – mathematics? geometry? consciousness? – something, it is still believed, lies behind our everyday experience. And that something is more pure and perfect than the tangled mess that is our normal experience. I am not saying that this search is entirely useless. No-one could ever claim that there is NOT, in fact, some kind of underlying perfect order to the universe. It’s not the idea that there is perfection that is truly dangerous, it’s the idea that there is a split.

So either the world is messy and incoherent and contingent all the way through, or it’s a mixture of perfection and imperfection. Both these

options are what the Western mind has trained itself to find intolerable. Perfection must always be in a SEPARATE world.

There are a few caveats however. What of

religion, we could ask? Is the real heaven the reality that lies behind humanity’s misguided yearnings for perfection? Well, all I can say here is that contemplating heaven quickly leads to paradox, if not contradiction. Religion must try to resolve this somehow – our minds not adequate for taking in the grandeur of heaven, for instance? Whether these explanations are ever sufficient depends, of course, on your faith, or lack thereof. Christianity has, I think, one clear advantage over other belief systems in this regard. It seems to be able to embrace both transcendence and immanence. Not quite the mixture of perfection and imperfection alluded to above perhaps (most Christians, for instance, regard Christ as perfect) but at least an acknowledgement that there is value in both. But again, for the most part, it seems believers themselves are not that comfortable with this –

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