My Worldview In A Nutshell

Here is the way I generally look at life.

"Fact" pertains to the "isness" of life, without regard to our interior world, such as feelings and ideas. It is that part of reality over which we have no control, such as to whom we were born, where we were born, and our individual genetic makeup.

"Acts" is behavior. Axiomatically, behavior drives thoughts. Reinforcing and promoting of good behavior leads to good thoughts. The converse-- that good thoughts leads to good behavior-- is a fool's errand. Thus, parents and teachers expend great effort trying to teach kids the Golden Rule in the hope that they won't bully their playmates. But what they really should be focusing on is learning moments that come out of their children's behavior-- either rewarding good behavior or punishing bad behavior.

The last column is entitled "thought". This is both the most interesting and the least significant part of my view of life. It is the most interesting part because it embraces the greatest and most challenging ideas and ideals of humanity, including religion, politics, and art. It is the least significant because excessive rumination in distinction to acts leads to errors and evil.

I was watching a biography last night of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhold Heydrich. He was a Renaissance man-- a gifted musician, highly intelligent, a skilled sportman-- and also an architect of the holocaust. His genocidal impluses flowed out of his inner world informed as it was with anti-semitism and ambition, constrained only by his assassination in Prague. Heydrich's future would have been different if his behavior was shaped at an early age by more positive forces. This is an extreme example, but it is true also wiuth theists and atheists, liberals and conservative, Hindus and Catholics, Republicans and Democrats, Marxists and liberterians. These are but labels put on ideas that do not always flow out of behavior. Rather than debating the labels-- does God exist, for example-- it seems to me it would be much more worthwhile to focus on questions of behavior-- what does it mean to raise truthful children, for example.






Finally, around it all, I have a box, a metaphysical representation of God as the first principle and the ontological ground of all existence. What I haven't included, however, is the implication of two parallel worlds, such as secular and sacred or worldly and spiritual. I see little justification in such dichotomies. Also, there is no implication of a transcendent supreme force or being that orchestrates our behavior, a varient of fatalism that abdicates our role in intentionally molding ethical behavior.