If there’s one thing I got out of my brief academic heights, it is this self-contradictory, er, factoid: nobody really knows anything. It has corollaries, like look hard enough at any single issue and you will turn from certainty to doubt. What it comes down to is a simple three-word phrase which is, again, self-contradictory: truth is relative.
Certainly, I found in something approaching “Socratic dialogue” (before I knew what that was) that within myself, I wasn’t sure of anything. When pushing people as to why they thought certain things, I discovered that very few people knew why they believed anything. Now, in some cases, I refused to accept their answers, because quickly I made relativism my basic presupposition, and anybody who didn’t believe that truth was relative to the observer suddenly found it very hard to convince me that there was truth beyond human understanding and experience. As you can see, this is a catch-22, because to convince me that truth was not relative, you would have to start with the presupposition that it was, otherwise I would not listen to you. Oops. (Yes, it may have been possible to take this down with a proper reductio ad absurdum, but my eyes still would have glazed over as soon as you started in on propositional truth.) But I never considered any alternative, because to do that, I would have to reach outside myself. I relied primarily on myself as the sole arbiter of truth for the vast majority of my life.
This attitude in me began in high school and completely took me over in college. Who can I blame for this? Not my high school, and not my church (although it would have been good if they had really pushed me to defend the truth in my own life, and exposed this problem; this should be part and parcel of determining whether somebody is actually a Christian, particularly for introspective, philosophically self-reliant types like myself), and not my parents, with whom I rarely communicated about things like this. It wasn’t even my friends, although they knew I was like this and implicitly let it slide (or perhaps agreed, but I have to leave that sort of thing to them to decide). No, for this I have to turn to my own wicked heart, bound up with foolishness, deceitful and desperately wicked.
To me, the good news was discovering a God Who was bigger than human conceptions of morality and causality. I spent some of high school as an inconsistent determinist, and then upon learning a tiny bit about quantum mechanics, I became a Deist for all practical purposes. I still held to traditional creeds and doctrines, verbally and outwardly, but my moral foundation was pulled out from under me by the pragmatic moral speculations of my favorite fiction authors, particularly in works like Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, and science fiction in which morality had decayed into an entirely pragmatic cooperative system, like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the Future History series, and Asimov’s Foundation series and The Gods Themselves.
This, then, is the key to much of my future spiritual journey: knowing that essentially I was a relativist, and that was my excuse for the sin I allowed to overtake my life, as rebellion against my parents in high school, as rebellion against “church” and Christian morality in principle in college, and then in early adulthood, as outwardly expressed, actual, “works of my hands” kinds of sin: giving silent but tacit approval to sinful lifestyles, letting lust reign in all my appetites and seeing it grow outward in immoral relationships, and finally, the ultimate hypocrisy, believing that I was living for the Lord and striving to be a part of a conservative church the whole time. I thought that “God looketh on the heart” meant that God winked at outward sin as long as you were trying; then occasionally I would swing the other way and determine to stop sinning, mostly out of fear of judgment in this world, and set aside for a time outward signs of sin, all the while nursing rebellion in my heart. This, essentially, is the part of my testimony that is Gnostic in every way; why would a spiritual God care about the physical body, except insofar as it impinged on the spiritual life of another? Sometimes I indulged, and sometimes I denied myself, but in all these things I was trying to reach the God I had invented, the God Who would let me do what I wanted to do, make me happy in this world, and then reward me in the next because I knew the right answers for the test.
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