New years thoughts

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

G. K. Chesterton

History and the study of Reality

I was watching the History channel last night. There was a series they created called the Seven Deadly Sins, portraying an early Christian’s synopsis of the sins of the Bible. As there is not a ’standard’ list anywhere in the Bible, the big 7 was capitalized upon by the Romanist system somewhere around 1000 AD. As the topic of the series put on by the History channel is not my purpose, I will speak little more of those sins. History, on the other hand is an important reference point for any thinking person, and this is where I wish to spend this post.

Simply put, there is not a wholly agreed upon ‘truth’ in the rendering of History, as each formulation of what has happened in the past is the result of some ‘mind’. When history is put onto paper, there must be some distillation of facts as an interpretive creation. When a person writes–anything that is written– there is, in essence, a memory that is made in a tangible form i.e. paper/ink, computer/screen, stone/chisel, etc. When I read a history narrative, whether scholarly or biased, or watch an entertaining show on the History channel (subsidiary of the Discovery channel, known Darwinists), I must remind myself that the resulting piece is some ‘thing’ that someone ‘made’, for a reason. As much as I or anyone else would like to believe that the essence of something that happened that was captured in writing, the fact is, like any moment that you or I live, is a moment that is inexorably beyond words. There could not be enough words used to capture some ‘time’ in history.

What is all this about? As much as some one writes a history of something for a purpose–whether to convince, to find solace or therapy, to memorialize, etc.– there is always a mind behind the writing. There is, by necessity, an interpretation of the facts of the Real.

There sits more proof why there must be a Person behind the whole of Reality. The existence of God is quite easy to believe, since the existence of Man is a given. We are, by nature, Biographers, and not Historians.

“There is properly no history, only biography.” Ralph Waldo Emerson