We might not believe in water turning into wine or spirits etc and laugh at those that did/do, but we’re just as easily fooled today into believing things that aren’t true with absolute certainty today (hence the topic of this thread), because we’re human and humans don’t behave like logical/rational machines and the easiest person to lie to is ourselves. Everyone one of us has erroneous beliefs about something because we’re not capable of knowing everything, and some of those beliefs play an important part in how people live their lives - for better or worse - so it ends up being the same ****, different millennia, whether that’s Scientology, ‘Utopia can be achieved via x political system!’ or something else.
What Sacks sees as literal truth I see more as useful (at the time) fiction, but the difference now is instead of collectively having a more or less single grand unifying story/structure to live our lives by, we have numerous less grand, conflicting or competing narratives that don’t appear to be doing anything other than fracturing society back down into tribes or general indifference... and societies, especially the sort most of us live in now, don’t spring up out of nowhere and perpetuate by chance, it takes work from the individual to the collective level to maintain, otherwise eventually they decay and fall apart, and from the numerous historical examples of this it isn’t a nice place to be whether that’s a failed state or a slide to authoritarianism at either end of the political spectrum.
(I’m agnostic btw)
