The UB says that our ability to discover truth and meanings and to expand our understanding of universe reality while gaining knowledge and perspective is due to our personality and mind endowment. We are designed, engineered, and created to seek more and more understanding of the world and universe around us and the how and the why of it all.
Those who lack curiosity and the determination to know and understand more are often plagued by self inflicted prejudice – a stubborn pride and blind loyalty to one’s current beliefs and opinions. Prejudice is a close cousin to ignorance, as the most prejudiced among us also lack sufficient knowledge to overcome that false confidence in our current reality perspective and beliefs.
Those who embrace reincarnation and those who reject it may both equally be prejudiced and also equally ignorant – lacking relevant knowledge. It is not false beliefs that are the real problem or obstacle. Rather it is the pride in our misunderstanding and false beliefs that calcify into brittle prejudice.
This, of course, is true of many false beliefs about science, religion, and philosophy. Certainly is belief (or disbelief really) in reincarnation a rather insignificant example I think. False beliefs and ignorance are not obstacles to those who seek knowledge, understanding, truth, and reality perspective.
Faith may prosper despite ignorance and even prejudice but true growth is certainly retarded by our egotistical loyalty to our current beliefs and the fear to know more and understand better than we do now.
Prejudice is self limiting in a universe and a selfhood designed for eternal adventure and discovery and growth! Scientists who believe there is no God and religionists who believe there is no science.
Holy Moly!
100:1.2 (1094.4) Some persons are too busy to grow and are therefore in grave danger of spiritual fixation. Provision must be made for growth of meanings at differing ages, in successive cultures, and in the passing stages of advancing civilization. The chief inhibitors of growth are prejudice and ignorance.
101:8.4 (1115.1) Faith does not shackle the creative imagination, neither does it maintain an unreasoning prejudice toward the discoveries of scientific investigation. Faith vitalizes religion and constrains the religionist heroically to live the golden rule. The zeal of faith is according to knowledge, and its strivings are the preludes to sublime peace.
111:4.9 (1220.8) Since this inner life of man is truly creative, there rests upon each person the responsibility of choosing as to whether this creativity shall be spontaneous and wholly haphazard or controlled, directed, and constructive. How can a creative imagination produce worthy children when the stage whereon it functions is already preoccupied by prejudice, hate, fears, resentments, revenge, and bigotries?
Restated in modern phraseology, the substance of Jesus’ teaching was:
132:3.2 (1459.2) Truth cannot be defined with words, only by living. Truth is always more than knowledge. Knowledge pertains to things observed, but truth transcends such purely material levels in that it consorts with wisdom and embraces such imponderables as human experience, even spiritual and living realities. Knowledge originates in science; wisdom, in true philosophy; truth, in the religious experience of spiritual living. Knowledge deals with facts; wisdom, with relationships; truth, with reality values.
132:3.3 (1459.3) Man tends to crystallize science, formulate philosophy, and dogmatize truth because he is mentally lazy in adjusting to the progressive struggles of living, while he is also terribly afraid of the unknown. Natural man is slow to initiate changes in his habits of thinking and in his techniques of living.
132:3.4 (1459.4) Revealed truth, personally discovered truth, is the supreme delight of the human soul; it is the joint creation of the material mind and the indwelling spirit. The eternal salvation of this truth-discerning and beauty-loving soul is assured by that hunger and thirst for goodness which leads this mortal to develop a singleness of purpose to do the Father’s will, to find God and to become like him. There is never conflict between true knowledge and truth. There may be conflict between knowledge and human beliefs, beliefs colored with prejudice, distorted by fear, and dominated by the dread of facing new facts of material discovery or spiritual progress.
132:3.5 (1459.5) But truth can never become man’s possession without the exercise of faith. This is true because man’s thoughts, wisdom, ethics, and ideals will never rise higher than his faith, his sublime hope. And all such true faith is predicated on profound reflection, sincere self-criticism, and uncompromising moral consciousness. Faith is the inspiration of the spiritized creative imagination.
(continues)……
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."