I read a comment in another article today that I thought spoke to your concern here.
The commenter claimed that Christians needed an anchor (e.g. the Bible) as their source of truth. I think he was probably right. I think, in order to hold a community together, you need an anchor that everyone can see and refer to.
Books, like the Bible or Koran, have proven to be very good at binding people together, keeping them mostly cohesive, and allowing them to aggregate into very large communities. But I think if we want to foster a truly global community, we need something better - a more universal anchor than a book.
I think perhaps one of the most challenging parts of the human experience is that we are always a little bit alone inside our heads. We do our best to create connection, but there's always a non-zero gap in perspective that we can't bridge completely.
But although by some measures, we all carry our own little universes in our heads, we nevertheless do interact with each other in one big, shared, universal space (e.g. reality, or whatever you want to call it). We all have different experiences and interpretations of this shared space - often wildly so. But despite our wide variations in perspective of this universal space, at least we all do have access to it. We all have the ability to detect things in the shared space, and detect changes to the space. And so I think, if we want a universal anchor - with which to build a universal community - we need the anchor to be in this universal space.
And that's ultimately what I was getting at with my story. The moon and the sun exist in our shared space. So we can all point at them and refer to them together.
I think we should encourage thought systems that use the universal space as their anchor. And I think we should discourage thought systems that use something else as their anchor. Because other anchors aren't universal enough to foster a global community. The scientific method is a good example of the former. While prophet-based religions tend to be good examples of the latter.
Ultimately, I'm just trying to foster a global community that can agree on things well enough to work together and get along. And more specifically here, I'm trying to formalize a way to think about doing that - which seems to me like it could be a useful and helpful undertaking. If you can think of better paradigms to talk about this or better strategies for fostering global communication than what I've done here, that I'd be happy for your thoughts.
But it does seem to me like calling everything a gray area leaves too much room for abuse, and is not enough of an anchor for a global community.
What do you think?
