posted September 06, 2013 12:43 AM            

On top of that the people who question fundamentals usually make others uncomfortable (or at least bore them) so it can be social suicide that can even lead to literal suicide (and people used to be tortured and executed for it, still are in some parts of the world, and even in America it can come off as "unpatriotic" or "not having faith" which leads to violence against the questioner or at least a lot of guilt for daring to think for one's self). An honest investigation into one's beliefs seems much more likely to generate more questions than answers and that makes life more complicated, too, and therefore not rewarding to most people.

No system of thought and knowledge that is applicable to all of humanity can be formulated, at least not until our species learns how to eradicate individuality (or at least severely repress it by direct neurological tampering). Not unless you count math.

I do not agree that the examined life is not worth living for people in general, plenty of people do just fine without it while plenty who examine it are miserable and lead a terrible existence. That's generally speaking, however, there are a few people who are driven to do so and for them they can't stop themselves from examining life and systems of thought anymore than they can stop eating. And a few of those people (Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens as one example) manage to make their lives a lot better from thinking things through more and questioning everything around them while there are plenty of sad people out there who suffer for their self-hating beliefs (like gays raised to believe God hates & curses gays) because of their inability to question them.

And for most people it's not necessary for survival and happiness to understand why we believe something, that is one doesn't have to THINK before they "think," and they do just fine in life (or at least no worse than those who do a lot of introspective thinking and metacognition). And on top of that actually examining one's belief has been a fast track for thousands of years to being forced to drink hemlock or burned at the stake (while convincing the victim and everyone else that the "gods were angry") so our species isn't really bred to think save in the most superficial ways, and it can be argued that it was necessary to survival and happiness NOT to examine one's life and beliefs too hard.

However, that said, I have to throw in one of my favorite sayings:

posted September 26, 2013 04:12 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by PixieJane:

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posted September 28, 2013 06:48 PM            

Power corrupts
Knowledge is power
Study hard
Be evil