Hypothetically speaking...

As the title suggests, I am speaking hypothetically and am not trying to point a finger at one person in particular. It was the case, however, that someone did inspire this post, though a name will not be disclosed.

Alright. So, I was recently talking with someone and was joking around having a good time. For anyone that knows my humor, I hardly ever take anything seriously and you know when I am taking something seriously. Otherwise, you just assume that it is innocent fun and I do not mean anything by it. Some have called me passive aggressive with my humor, which I suppose one could say I am, but that was not the case in this instance. Others have not been able to take my humor seriously, so I have had to tone it down a lot, especially when I am working. However, this was around a group of people who I hang out with quite frequently. Anyways, the story goes one from here, but I just thought I would clarify a bit.

So I was joking around and made some comment to which this person commented back that my comment could be taken offensively and they gave me a bit of a mini lecture on correctness and such. Granted, my joke was religious, but it was not a malicious religious joke. I merely said that I was a rabbi (clearly I am not considering I was raised Christian and there is really no way I could be a real Jew...except in the more liberal branches of Judaism, but I digress). This person made the observation that my comment could be considered blasphemous since I was not really a rabbi and Jews may take it the wrong way and be offended.

This person surprised me to a degree because when I had said it I did not mean anything by it and was just trying to be silly and random, as goes my humor the majority of the time. This person is always conscious of words that may offend someone, but in this moment, I think they took it a bit too far. I was merely joking around (it somehow fit into the scenario) and did not mean anything by it.

Where is this post going then, you may ask. Well, I am going to tell you right now, other than a complaining rant, which I am going to try and not post on here.

Anyway, I think what really disturbed this person was not the fact that I was joking around and could possibly offend the absent Jewish person, but that I was not telling the truth because I am not truly a rabbi. First of all, is this really lying? I suppose in the conventional definition of the term, I would have been lying, but then every time anyone jokes around, couldn't they be lying? I suppose some jokes are free of lies, but in this instance, was I really lying? I did not think I was, but the way this person framed their response to my joke made it seem that they had a big issue with lying, which is understandable considering their background.

From this comment, I suppose I made the assumption that this person is really concerned with telling the truth and reality. That is to say, they are more concerned with telling the truth than telling an untruth for the sake of comedy. I suppose I can respect that. But I have to go back to my first statement in this block of text: that they are concerned with telling the truth and reality. After I had written that on my scrap sheet of paper, it made me think about the nature of truth in conjunction with reality. Is reality really the truth? (Note: I am saying 'truth' not 'Truth' or 'True.') That is to say, can we assume reality to be true? Can you trust your experiences as being true? I would lean towards the affirmative on this position and declare that our subjective realities are truth for us. What I experience every day is true, what you experience every day is true, what the Dalai Lama experiences every day, and what Barack Obama experiences every day is true. And when I say that they are true, then that means that they are, by extension, the truth for those individuals. When asked what you did today, you can be certain that what you say, based on what you said, is true (unless you have CRS, in which case remembering what you did today would be difficult and you may lie to make your life look interesting).

Assuming that this person is in agreement with me, in that what you do is true, then how can she read fiction? Granted, you may go into the reading and claim that what you are about to read is no true and never happened, therefore making the act of you reading the book true while the content in that book is not true. However, I continued to think along those lines and questioned as to whether you could read non-fiction. How can you be certain that what you read in this book is true. Certainly the author cites their sources extensively, but how can we be certain that we can trust those sources? I think that I would like to say one more thing on this subject, and then move on to the bigger idea behind this experience, so long as your brain has not exploded or you are merely utterly confused. So, you can say that you read a non-fiction book, which would mean that you are telling the truth: you indeed did read that biography of Abraham Lincoln. However, that does not mean that the content of that book is necessarily true. I think the same can be said about a fiction book: who is to say that what occurs in the novel (which we assume to be false) is not actually true?

After tying that, I realized that what I had just typed makes more sense in person/in my head and I do not blame you if you do not understand a word of what I just said. It may even be the case that what I said is a bunch of rubbish. However, this leads me to an idea that I have held for an extremely long time and has become somewhat of a personal philosophy of mine, though it certainly does not apply to all aspects of my life. The idea is this: in order to discern whether what you are reading is actually true or not, would not you have to experience it for yourself. This goes back to the first point that I made in this post and I just realized how nicely these two ideas mesh. To reassert my personal maxim: in order for something to be true, you have to experience it for yourself.

I can think of at least one example from my own personal life in which this maxim is particularly relevant. First, when someone gets hit really hard and they start crying or whining and moaning, I am, in all seriousness, a bit skeptical. How do I know for certain that they are hurting? Furthermore, how do I know that their pain is as great as they are making it seem? It seems to me that the only way to truly understand their experience is to actually experience it for myself, in the exact same manner. The only way I will ever understand how much that ball to the face hurt, I would personally have to get hit in the face just as hard.

Therefore, it is extremely important to me, at least at this point, to fill my life with experiences so that when someone speaks to me about their own experience, I can truly empathize. I will better understand what they are talking about. I think that is about it on this topic. At this point, one may object and question as to why I am a history major then, if I cannot trust information until I experience it for myself. As I stated at the outset of this discussion, this does not affect all aspects of my life. I feel just fine trusting historical documents and other sources of information. It is difficult to explain, but that is basically how I feel. Comment on this if you want/need/desire clarification.

This post is already getting really long, so I think I may stop here even though I have a few other topics to talk about.

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