PART IV PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY
last updated: 05/14/2003
ON THE REALITY OF SOVEREIGN IDEALS
Does one exist or not exist? This is a question one might ask one self.
Nonexistence requires the question abide mute. There is no question.
Needless to say the question has been asked again and again, from time immemorial. The question will continue to be asked invariably as each newly created being seeks to explain a separate and distinct world of individual perceptions. The answer, as in the past, must always be the same - one does exist - for the question once asked, affirms its eminent answer. It is the essence of ones individuality that compels the question. It is the essence of reality that makes undeniable the profundity of the answer.
Once addressed the issue of existence leads to another fundamental inquiry. Critical in this inquiry is the issue of conduct, i.e., participation in the temporal state of affairs encountered by the individual, an issue to be reckoned with from the mothers womb to ones last breath of air.
An individual comes into this world subject to the demands of a physical form of being. A form in which one is unable to survive without the aid and comfort of a yet to be conceptualized paramount force, the very means of ones being. As one matures one seeks a basis for understanding the circumstance of this existence, an existence grounded in the stark reality of a material world.
As the quandaries of life bare upon ones intellect, ideals and sense of purpose provide the where with all to cope with the daily challenge of the unknown. To accomplish this task one must identify and rank in importance those forces deemed relevant to an ideal and purposeful existence. The passions of the individual intellect however, coupled with the frailties of human nature, make the sharing of ideals and a sense of purpose one of man kinds most formidable challenges.
The intellect through conceptualization and communication provides the individual with a means of identifying an autonomous causation of existence. Language, when utilized as a basic mode of communication, employs words in achieving this shared order of consciousness. Language however is only useful to the extent that a meeting of the minds is realized. Diverse languages, dialects and subtleties of definition within a given language, give rise to misinterpretation and therewith interject an additional challenge into the art and science of communication. Words as symbols of our individual conceptualizations however remain a primary and, in many formats, the dominate mode of communication.
The consequential causation of our temporal existence and therefore the very nature of our most passionate of conceptualizations is historically symbolized in the English language by the generic word God. Nevertheless the authority as to whether this word invokes the conceptualization of a Great Spirit, Nature's God, the Supreme Judge of the world, a Big Bang, a random collision of Subatomic Particles, or any, all, or none of a multitude of proposed causes for our existence, ultimately resides in the mind and intellect of the individual.
Therefore utilization of the generic term God in the affairs and institutions of a nation is not "respecting an establishment of religion" but rather insures "the free exercise thereof" by authenticating as a matter of fact the creation and individual existence of those people that constitute the nation. Without this shared realization of the creation of the individual, a creation emanating from the paramount force of a shared cosmos, the whole of the nation suffers the loss of ideals and sense of purpose, ideals and sense of purpose mandatory in securing those truths set forth as self-evident at the founding of the nation.
June 2002
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