I saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

What is happening in this scene?

A typical modern “wise fool” of the religious right is made to feel her limits. She may be unable to comprehend the aesthetic truth which stands outside the horizons of her totalistic vision of life, but the certainty that there is something here to know and the certainty that she is missing it is a viscerally real experience.

This dreadful embarrassment might very well have been this woman’s first authentic experience of transcendent truth.

*

It has become certain: something that concerns me is going on beyond my own sphere of intellectual mastery. How do I respond to this certainty? How do I relate myself to this beyondness, this Otherness? This is the root of one’s religious character. And everyone, without exception, has religious character.

Most forms of religiosity involve some kind of invalidation and reduction of beyondness. Invalidation: what exists beyond my mastery doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t exist in any way that concerns me, or its existence is a mistake, or it has no right to exist and ought to be annihilated. Reduction: what exists beyond my mastery is actually some by-product or derivation of things that are within my mastery. (The philosophies of Materialism and Metaphysical Idealism are two extreme, opposing forms of reductionism.)

Forms of religiosity based on invalidation and reduction reassure us: Whatever you need to know you already know. What you need to do is already clear.

*

I think it might be time for a public debate on the difference between the foolishness of the wise and the wisdom of fools. What makes the “wise” foolish? Isn’t it feeling so wise that nobody can tell you anything you don’t already know?

We need to shed this prejudice that a low IQ protects a mind against the foolishness of the wise. Intellectual arrogance has a lot less to do with loving the extent of our intelligence than with reflexively hating what stands beyond the limits of our intelligence and inspires dread.

In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan speaks for all who close themselves to the dread of beyondness:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

*

To the degree a man’s truth is closed and private, when he speaks his private truth he is crazy and when he lives his private truth he is evil.

To the degree that man figures out how to share that truth and to speak it with others becomes sane and good — to the others who share it, and to himself. But in the end, if he only considers himself and his community of fellow-believers he still has a private truth, and his insanity and evil are just multiplied, and his ability to recognize that fact is diminished.

It is tremendously difficult to be responsible for the sanity and good of your collective. The collective itself will hold your responsible for being responsible and not indulging its easy, insular agreement with itself that it is privileged in possessing truth and goodness.

Before 0 A.D., an individual had moral obligations only to his own tribe. Individuals were not permitted to be solipsistic and satanic (in Milton’s sense) — but nations were another story. The notion of loving one’s enemy was absurd.

*

There is no way out of our current cultural impasse except to realize we all have important and disruptive lessons to learn from one another. We need the knowledge, but even more, we need the disruption.

Everyone has something to show us about life — even a filthy Samaritan, an arrogant Scribe, a noble Roman, a degraded prostitute, a corrupt official, a disgraced, discredited, godforsaken heretic.

An experiment: See if you can accept an insight from a fundamentalist or an atheist today.