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The Principle of Scrutiny and Doubt |
The Principle of Self Scrutiny is the recognition that we are imperfect and that the pursuit of reality is always a goal and that knowledge is ever growing. It is the acknowledgement that sometimes we get it wrong and that we should always test ourselves and our world view to make sure that what we think is real actually is real. This is what we call the Purification of Truth. It is a test to ensure that we are not fooling ourselves. It makes sure that we are not living the lie. And it makes us accountable to the truth.
The Church of Reality is a doubt based religion as opposed to a (blind) faith based religion. Realists are required to doubt everything and to continually test both old and new ideas to verify that they are still true. Blind faith is irresponsible and bypasses accountability. We doubt everything because we care about reality. By doubting we accept responsibility for preserving the integrity of the truth.
We welcome doubt and scrutiny as a means of purifying truth. It makes us accountable and ensures the integrity of our beliefs.
We are of limited knowledge with a limited brain; primitive computers trying to understand our existence. We need to be humble in our understanding of understanding and fully aware of our flaws and the processes that would lead us to a path of self illusion. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who don't know and those who don't know that they don't know. Let us never become the latter.
We as Realists practicing Realism must therefore always rely on our doubt to test ourselves and to test our world view against reality. We need to continually reexamine our world view to look for errors or to have a deeper understanding of what we think we already know. There is always a certain amount of trash in the Tree of Knowledge. Much of this trash comes from old world views that were never challenged or the lies of people who would distort reality for selfish reasons. Purification of Truth requires doubt as the process of cleansing the Tree of Knowledge of error, and is a necessary process in Positive Evolution.
People have suggested that this Church of Reality will degenerate into hypocrisy as most other religions have; that it will become some bastardized religion that uses the name "Reality" as a brand name for an oppressive cult. Could this actually happen to the Church of Reality? Absolutely it could. But if we stick to this principle of self scrutiny and always sincerely ask the sacred question, "Is this really real?", and be prepared to face the challenge of getting real, then we can hope that we will be able to stay relatively uncorrupted.
Many religions degenerate because they accept things by faith that shouldn't be accepted. And because of their faith they are prohibited from asking questions. Therefore if they are wrong then they have no process of correcting they mistakes. The Church of Reality embraces doubt as a way of staying accountable. Through doubting the things we get right will still be right, and the things we get wrong will get fixed. By embracing doubt we accept accountability, responsibility, and we can hope to maintain integrity and avoid becoming an old, stale, fossilized belief system.
We in the Church of Reality want to share our gift of the purification of truth with other religions and we invite all people of all faiths to benefit from thinking about the reality of what they believe in. We think that everyone makes mistakes no matter what religion you belong to. With tens of thousands of brands of Christians that exist there are a lot of mistakes. Perhaps your church can be improved? How do you know you are really a true Christian or a true Muslim? We accept your scrutiny and doubt. We challenge you to match us. |
