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Stop Asking Why
Being part of multiple online discussions and groups hell-bent on difficult conversations online, I’ve had multiple experiences in the comments sections. If there is one lesson I learned, it is this: Don’t ask why.
It was counterintuitive to me to think that someone wouldn’t want to explain why they think one thing or another, but that is the reality. Or at least the current reality I have experienced.
So much of my reading is focused on history, and in particular the history of Western civilization. I have a need to understand the world we live in and from whence it came. Not just dates and times, but ideas. And the more you dig into ideas, the further back you go and the more abstract it gets. But also the more patterns emerge and the more sense seemingly unconnected events and ideas start to stick together.
Never would I have seen a tie to literacy with modern consciousness (introspection) and the invention of the printing press in a community hell-bent (pun-intended) on learning to read the Bible. All of that connected to a Protestant Revolution insistent on a personal connection with God and a man from Galilee insisting on a separation of God and Caesar which became the separation of church and state which defines our secular world.
“He whose vision cannot cover history’s three thousand years, must in outer darkness hover, live within…
