Holy Trinity
An entangled metaphysical triumvirate. A confession that even faith is subject to standards of human reason if we are going to have others take us seriously about our beliefs.
Comprised of three proper nouns - The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit - that are simultaneously God himself; an indication that language alone fails at effectively clarifying things of importance to human minds. The complexities necessary for profound human meaning progress from there, including their interconnectivity, coherence to the word and the spirit, and their designation as created or uncreated.
Attempts are made by religious scholars and philosophers to discover truth within texts and events, and the holy trinity is just one of many. Interestingly, this discovery of truth is necessarily confined to a predetermined set of linguistic and experiential parameters. Traditionally, these prisons of human imagination are precisely the culprits that interfere with an authentic pursuit of truth. If anything of value is produced, it would be categorized as valid only within a subset of prescribed phenomena, which does not generally elevate it to the status of truth.
If something is only true within a realm of prescription plagued by linguistic imprecision, then it will fail to adequately persuade anyone occupying a position beyond its framework. Things of this sort cannot be true in any universal sense without undergoing an effective conjugation in concept that would seek to generalize it in some sense. Once this is achieved, which can and has been done with various religious ideas, they may then qualify as meta-true, that is, existing or valid beyond a normative sense of verifiable truth. Despite this characterization inferring something less legitimate, humans find meta-truths particularly compelling, and most of our institutions are built upon a presumption of their unparalleled quality. They are the foundations of the most coherent narratives.
The likeliest explanation for the human predisposition to create and attach narratives to virtually everything is our innately narrative-formulating BRAIN. We imprint our memories with stories of sense-making that efficiently renders them coherent enough for us to act in the world. While this process is adequate in generating forward momentum, human intuitions are famously poor and personally exculpatory, which suggests that while we are natural story tellers, most of our tales are incoherent and self-serving.
Most religions, albeit not necessarily every story or lesson contained within, exemplify the sorts of products that have developed through natural processes and have remained important to humanity for thousands of years. They are extended phenotypes that assist us in solving problems or transmitting knowledge that we value for human survival. Their ubiquitous emergence and capacity for cross-cultural adoption corroborate this.
Narratives that undergo the perpetual gauntlet known as the SCIENTIFIC METHOD, are either deservedly flattened, or they receive an increase in resolution, clarifying details of human importance. The more coherent they become, the more likely they will serve as a legitimate articulation of human adaptation.
Maladaptive narratives appear to be just as immortal as adaptive ones, and so they need to be contended with all the same.
Perhaps it is precisely these countervailing chronicles that harness evolutionary principles to compel an increase in narrative quality over time?
Only time will tell which stories remain, and which are destined to die a thousand deaths.
See: DARK TRIAD
Revised: 22 Mar 2023
