Some things strike me immediately as making sense.

What I know to be false, is that there is ‘the Truth’. You can get very close in maths and physics but they’re not nearly so messy as all of what mother nature cooked up.

I’ve been reading through Bear Grylls’ “Soul Fuel”, as a way of getting insight into how inspired people get their inspiration. It is a very open love letter to the Bible, although with some interesting details appearing amongst it.

However I find myself strongly disagreeing with some of the passages from the Bible. Where God will instruct you on the small things of life – whether you should do your business ‘above board’ – what does that even mean? Not paying tax?

My brain screams at all the waffle words. Generic stuff that followers of Christ seem to make up to somehow make God sound more powerful.

Even Martin Luther King, who gives a wonderful description of the Measure of Man through a story in the Bible, interprets the story in his own way, that might or might not be the actual meaning. God says there’s three dimensions, King gets to decide what each of those dimensions mean. I can make up my own scale:

1. Ability to laugh
2. Ability to raise children
3. Ability to mime

Now obviously King has far more credibility than me for making up the dimensions – but it’s still making them up. It’s not based on any evidence. Is there really only 3 dimensions? Are there more are there less? Every explanation that someone comes up with is just a complete mess of ‘maybes’, ‘perhaps’, ‘in this case’, ‘for these people’, ‘at this time’.

How truthful are psychological studies? That psychological study you read needs a small print list of who exactly this study is relevant for. Like health warnings on food, they should all include – what continent (and for extra credit, what country, city and neighbourhood please), what age range, what religious beliefs, what sex, what education, what privileges, what what what.

So finally I come across something I agree with, and it’s so clear that it jumps out of the page. I don’t have to cross examine what each of the terms mean. It explains in 10 easy steps that its practically bloody impossible for you and me to have the same view on what the ‘Truth’ is:

1. Different animals manifest different modes of perception;
2. Similar differences are seen among individual men;
3. For the same man, information perceived with the senses is self-contradictory
4. Furthermore, it varies from time to time with physical changes
5. In addition, this data differs according to local relations
6. Objects are known only indirectly through the medium of air, moisture, etc.
7. These objects are in a condition of perpetual change in colour, temperature, size and motion
8. All perceptions are relative and interact one upon another
9. Our impressions become less critical through repetition and custom
10. All men are brought up with different beliefs, under different laws and social conditions

– 10 modes/tropes of Aenesidemus

I’m not a fan of ‘manifest different modes of perception’ – that’s basically ‘we all perceive differently’? But the rest of the language used is clear and simple.

So as I understand it, most people barely consider how other people perceive stuff and that’s the first layer of incomprehensible hell.

This is why my brain screams each time the economists dream up their ‘average human’ and build entire societies on what this average human wants.

Aenesidemus argues that truth varies infinitely under circumstances whose relative weight cannot be accurately gauged.

We don’t know and we can’t measure.

There is no universal ‘Truth’.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

– Krishnamurti dissolution speech