I have done a lot of school but this may be the first time I’ve taken my learning into my own hands. My teachers are books, blogs, media, overheard conversations, music. My ears pick out the unknown name, word or idea from any sentence and remember it until I can look it up. Wikipedia is my friend, although I try to look at other websites first. I can’t pinpoint what I don’t know, except to say that they’re the things that non-religious culture take for granted that they know, because while my contemporaries were talking about world events and living popular culture, my entire existence was centered around one man and one book, both 2000 years old. I have a lot of catching up to do, not unlike arriving in another country and realizing you can’t take anything for granted. It is invigorating and disheartening all in one.
Today I learned about Salman Rushdie, the difference between atheism and agnosticism, and Kathmandu. This week I read Keats’ poetry for the first time, last week it was Tennyson and Galway Kinnell. I’m amassing a list of books to read (ie A Passage to India, Nature, anything and everything by Terry Pratchett) Add wars and dictators in the 19th century, and suicidal cult leaders to the list. Mostly I’m being challenged by atheists (not generally a scary group of people after all) and other non-religious types to think differently.
What I am most clear about is what I don’t know. I don’t know if there is a being who is god and what form that being takes. I don’t know how human beings came to be in the form they are now and what implications that has for what is ‘human nature’. I don’t know at what point a group of cells becomes a human being. Karen Armstrong describes the time after she left the convent when she first realized how much she didn’t know:
My problem… was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come anymore… It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent… My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman, and I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. (The Spiral Staircase)
Her story, from what I’ve read so far, ends with her being able to walk and even run, again. That’s good news.
