The coloured glasses behind our eyes

Humans must not look directly into the sun because this can damage our retina. In 1912, a sun eclipse caused alone in Germany 3000 cases of damaged retinas. (source)

Christian and Jewish faith says that we cannot see God directly (1 Timothy 6:16). The book Exodus describes how Moses talks with God “as with a friend, from face to face” (Exodus 33:11). A bit later in the same chapter, Moses asks God “Let me see your face”, and God answers “No human can see my face and remain living”, but then explains a plan to “lay his hand over Moses” to protect him from seeing his face, and then to remove his hand so that Moses can at least see his back. (Exodus 33:19-23) (also inspired e.g. by this)

The manifestations of rationalism invite us to remove these glasses.

I believe that fully removing those glasses behind your eyes is impossible because we need to make selections and apply filtering. The amount of data needed to digest the full reality is far bigger than any human brain can handle. Yes, we use only some percentage of our brain power, but there is a definitive physical limit. Even if some individual human potentially manages to increase this percentage from let’s say 10 to 90 percent, the result would still be just a fraction of what’s actually needed.

We can say “let’s learn to switch those glasses”. Let’s develop a red, a green and a blue filter and look at everything using those three colours in turn. That will result in a more realistic image of reality. That’s a good idea, and it is the basic idea of multicultural politics, one of the basic strategies of the European Union, and –believe it or not– one of the principles of the Synodal Church.