How Do You Even Know What You Know?

And why does it matter?

Rev Dr Sparky
7 min readAug 2, 2023

A longtime friend of the family recently surprised me with a late-night text — which he never used to do, but now, since he has a one-year-old son, I guess he’s up all hours like I am. Children are like Macbeth — they “hath murdered sleep.”

Anyway, I’m used to being a lone insomniac. So I was amused to see this message pop up, in the wee hours, when nothing makes sense anyhow:

“Could you please write something about dissenting opinions and why we need to start treating them differently or else go nuts?”

Photo by Francisco Ghisletti on Unsplash

A reasonable question, and he’s generally a cool and rational thinker. I’ll enjoy finding out what’s on his mind, I thought. But the three dots showed me he wasn’t waiting, and he went on:

“But the idea isn’t to bash anybody’s political side for victory points”

All right; he had my attention.

“The idea is — if you aren’t even willing to take the time to figure out WHY you think the way you do, or understand that those feelings maybe came from some singular life experience — or worse, if your “credo” or “faith-based” opinion is really just one of those sentiment-bombs that everybody HAS to believe in if they want to keep their membership in a particular club — ”

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Rev Dr Sparky

Preaching real real/igion for real people and courage in the face of absurdity. Follow me into the wilderness on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@revdrsparky.