Why Do We Face Difficulty in Distinguishing Facts from Falsehoods!

Man is slow to perceive that contrastive perfection and imperfection produce potential evil; that conflicting truth and falsehood create confusing error; that the divine endowment of freewill choice eventuates in the divergent realms of sin and righteousness.

Potential evil is time-existent in a universe embracing differential levels of perfection meanings and values. Sin is potential in all realms where imperfect beings are endowed with the ability to choose between good and evil. The very conflicting presence of truth and untruth, fact and falsehood, constitutes the potentiality of error.

[The Urantia Book Paper-54]

Golden Ceiling in the Temple of  Wat Traimit in Bangkok 

An attempt to achieve perfection in a world of imperfection!

Suppose that you wanted to teach your young child a well known thing. For example, you wanted your child to realize that the electrical plug point in your home has electricity and this electricity which is invisible is really dangerous if one touches. You wanted your child to realize this so that he or she would not dare to experiment with the socket in your absence and risk life.

Many good and obedient children might accept the valuable guidance given by the experienced elder. But there still exist a few other curious children who might not be satisfied with the eleder's advice. A few of them would be too curious to try touching the bare wire to know what happens. While doing it if they get a good shock and still survived it, they would perhaps never ever dare to do it again. Here they have learnt some hard facts of life by first hand experience!

But imagine a situation where a neighbour of you trying to trick your child in your absence without you never knowing about it. This fellow would cunningly approach your child and might try to convince the child not to believe its father. He might even show some tricks to the child to convince the child that the electricity cannot cause any problem as taught by the father earlier.

In this case, the child with the halfhearted faith in its father now would become a confused one. The child is confused and is not able to make up its mind to distinguish between right and wrong. It is becoming difficult for the child to judge whether its father was right or the cunning uncle next door who was obviously not a well wisher.

All at the same time, this child is also not a daredevil to try to experiment to know the facts for sure. Such a child would have doubts all through his life. He or she does not know for sure about the dangers of electricity or about the right safety steps to be adopted to handle it.

The problem with such a child or person is the inability to distinguish between right and wrong. To add to the problem, this person does not know whom to trust or believe. Besides, this person lacks the curiosity and adventure to undertake an act of experimentation and experience to judge facts from falsehood.

A good majority of humans do exist in this world in this manner. Even after attaining the age of adulthood, they remain with the mind of an immature, unintelligent and childish mind. The problem with them is their difficulty to judge between right or wrong, difficulty to understand facts from falsehoods and difficulty in judging a good advice from a bad advice.

The existence of clever and cunning uncles around them enhances their confusion. It becomes now difficult for them to trust their own parents. They do not know whom to trust now. They become a confused lot or a misguided lot when they keep living their lives on this earth. In turn some of them would become cunning uncles and aunts to younger ones around them, perpetuating falsehoods and enhancing confusions all around!

A confused person who is incapable of chosing the right path is bound to face danger at some point of time in life. It is not that such persons do not have the ability to judge between right or wrong. They do have the ability. But they suppress that ability by deliberately succumbing to their own confusions to grow within their minds.They let their lives to be played upon by cunning uncles and aunts around them and also let them to be like a confusing uncle or aunt to others, later.

Just as there are human confusion masters every where, there also exist super human deceptors who try to fool gullible humans. They want the humans to turn away from the right path and chose the wrong path that leads to destruction. That is the simple logic of the sadists: If I am going to be doomed, I want you too doomed like me! But for simple gullible humans, who cannot escape the tricks of other cunning humans, it is beyond their natural abilty under normal circumstances to escape from the pranks played by the tricksters.

The problem with the gullible people lies with their perception and intrepretation of things. They understand facts as falsehoods or falsehoods as facts quite too often. If they get someone to support their perceptions, it would be very difficult for them to make the corrections of their errors. And when they are dominated by ego, matter becomes too rigid and their errors become non-negotiable. They tend to side with evil by deviating from what is good.

Today I was listening to an interesting conversation among three of my colleagues. They have been analysing the hit and run case of the Hindi film star, Salman Khan and the judgement of the lower court that awarded the celebrity with a five year jail term. 

There were too many issues to be debated: Why did it take the court 13 years to conclude? Was it right for the poor victim to sleep on the foot path during the night of the accident? Was it right for the court to grant bail to the artist on the same day after declaring the punishment? The debate continued for some time and my learned friends concluded that it was quite right for the deceased poor man to sleep on the foot path and the actor was rightly punished for his arrogant alcoholic behavior. I know there are many others who feel just the opposite who keep arguing in support of the actor.

I am not here to judge what is wrong or what is right. All I wanted say is about the difficulty with which our right and wrong perceptions keep moving from time to time.

Had we been perfectly matured with knowledge, intelligence and wisdom, we all would have arrived at the same conclusion. If it is not so, then logically it proves that we have not attained perfection. Perhaps we have miles (generations) to go in this context (to achieve perfect maturity levels). Perhaps then only we would be in a position to judge what is right or what is wrong. Perhaps then only we could distinguish facts from falsehoods.

Till then, there are enough chances that our decisions and judgements are all erroneous in nature!

Two Plus Two Need Not Be Four For Everyone Now!

Long ago, when I began my professional career as an engineer in a large iron and steel company, I was posted as the engineer in charge of a water utility plant of the steel plant's captive thermal power plant.

When I joined, the plant facility was a new one under erection expected, to be commissioned for production in a few months time.

As a fresh chemical engineering post graduate from a premier engineering university of India, my knowledge in the practice of engineering was practically zero. While being engineering students in the graduation and post graduation levels, we were exposed to several units of study materials from which we acquired bits and pieces of information and knowledge in varying degrees. Our lecturers and professors were mostly good in making us exposed to some aspects of the information already available in the form of internationally accepted text books. They also made us undertake various practicals in well defined pedagogy. The authorized university authorities under the authority given to them by the statutes, tested us as per their procedures and awarded us the degree certificates which essentially provided us the license to get employed as engineers.

But each one of us understood engineering in a different manner. It was not a simple 'two plus two equals four' for us. Each one of us would be going to realize engineering differently in our later years!

Unfortunately or fortunately, those like us who started their profession as working engineers also realized the content of engineering differently in accordance with the work culture and work requirements of their own working areas. In other words, every one understood two plus two of engineering differently! Perhaps in the later years some of our kind added our own concepts and ideas and contributed to the creation of several pieces of non material creations on the face our earth. But we could never agree to any thing that we created as perfect or defect free!

Extending that analysis further down, I would be able to prove some thing which many of my readers might not agree. In my humble opinion, such a thing happens because of our imperfection of mind development.

We keep arguing over our discoveries, theories, inventions and ideas. We argue, because we cannot possibly agree on anything as perfectly alright. 

Let me now come back to the story of my initial days of work as the plant operation and maintenance engineer-in-charge. 

I found that there were several imperfections and defects in the plant which was planned by a reputed engineering consultancy group and executed by a reputed EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) contracting company. Those imperfections existed in my view point. Had those imperfections were not there, the plant would have been easier for my group to operate and maintain. That was what I thought. Those imperfections were going to have much headache to me in the future. I remember my struggles with the consultants and the EPC contractors to rectify the issues which were defects in my view point. I could only succeed partially.

Some years later, my role changed. From the role of a plant operation and maintenance in-charge, I was made as a plant design engineer in our company's in house project engineering consultancy group. By chance, I got an opportunity to independently plan another new water utility plant for another purpose in the steel plant. 

I took all the pains to plan one of the best possible plant design which did not cause any of the problems that I faced. The plant was erected and commissioned smoothly and was handed over to a different group of plant operation and maintenance engineers. I was expecting the new custodians of the plant giving me the praise for giving them such a wonderfully designed plant.

I was wrong. The new custodian engineers of this plant expected the plant to be in a different way than what I thought. There was no logic in what they were demanding according to my thoughts. Obviously, when I honestly considered two plus two as four in this case, my counterparts on the other side were not agreeing! 

All of us find these kinds of conflicts every where in our day to day life. 

We find it in hour families. The wife may not agree with the husband's idea or vice versa. When ideas and opinions do not match, it becomes a potential source for conflicts and might develop in to full scale aggravations. 

Adolescents and youths would seldom agree with their parents' ideas because of the wide difference in the maturity levels that exist between them.

In an evolutionary world of progress like that of our earth, each and every person exist with varying degrees of perfection levels. All are imperfect with regard to knowledge, experience, wisdom and maturity. We can say that all exist under varying degrees of perfection or imperfection.

God is the only one who is eternally and infinitely perfect.  God cannot personally know imperfection as His own experience. Experiencing the outcomes of imperfection is left to us!

In a way, we are better than God in this context, because we have the experience of imperfection while God does not have it directly. God has to gain the experience of imperfection from us.

In fact, God shares the consciousness of all the experience of imperfectness of all the struggling men and women of not only earth, but also of all the evolutionary worlds of the universe. 

God desires that all those imperfect evolutionary beings like us gradually mature to attain perfection through life experiences and become true sons and daughters of God who are fully willing to live according to the will of God.

Learning by experimentation and experience is better than learning by other means. We learn the comparative desirability of beauty when we are able to recognize ugliness. We understand the desirability of good when evil also is experienced.

God actually participates and is in touch with all human beings in their struggle of attaining perfection through their life experiences under situations of imperfections. We may not be aware of His presence within us.

Human limitations which are the causes of potential evil should not be construed as part of the divine nature God.

Evil is a potential outcome of the imperfections of free-willed beings like we humans. God does not cause evil nor He likes evil. 

Because of our misunderstandings arising out of our present imperfections, there is a possibility that we may attribute good and evil both as a result of God's will. 

If I say that is not the case, all of us are not going to agree anyway.

Because, there are many among us for whom two plus two is not four, yet. Till every one attains the peak practical level of knowledge and maturity, our problems of our own make, arising out of our misunderstandings will remain. And we keep on experiencing the contrasts of good and evil to conclude the desirability of good over evil, perhaps at some distant future!