I think world view has a major impact on people's perspectiv

Posted on: August 9, 2024 at 23:20:38 CT

es on political issues. People can see the same set of facts and interpret them quite differently depending upon that world view.

I personally like to see different opinions and dialogue with people with differing opinions. Sometimes it will give me information that causes me to adjust my opinions on certain things or certain people.

But in the grand scheme of things those are relatively minor adjustments. If we compared it to a big ship it would be like making changes that passengers wouldn't even notice. It would take a lot of them, or a change in some major premise that one holds, to make a significant adjustment in world view.

I think many people, myself included, also want to bring additional information into the discussion and perhaps to persuade others to bring their world views closer into line with our own.

For me it all boils down to a variation of the question Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, "What is truth?". That is truly the bottom line.

What is the meaning to life was a question that occasionally nagged at me in college & after. If we don't get that question right everything else we do can be either a waste of time or counterproductive, to the point of possible catastrophe.

I eventually decided that there are 3 possibilities.

1. The first was exemplified by a bumper sticker a friend and neighbor of mine put on his car. "He who dies with the most toys wins." To me, that was a hedonistic answer. Minimize pain and suffering and have as much fun as you can until you die. But that seemed like there really is no meaning to life. Just drift along like other animals until you are dead.

2. Survival of the fittest. Also analogous to the animals. Have as many surviving offspring that will also reproduce as you can. That bumper sticker might read something like "He who has the most descendants (or DNA in the gene pool) wins."
Some years later I decided that really was just a variation of #1. Eventually, perhaps many millennia from now, the sun will burn out or turn into a supernova... if the earth isn't hit by some asteroid or other planet or something. One way or another any "gene pool victory" will be meaningless. Humanity will be wiped out.

3. There is a religious meaning. This is the one I settled on. I had a comparative religions class years ago & didn't pay all that much attention. Most seemed crazy to me with little or no evidence to back them up, other than the one I had grown up with, Catholicism. It took me perhaps a couple of decades to come back, and then a couple more decades of discussing it on discussion forums and elsewhere, often with people quite hostile to it to really solidify my belief that it held up to scrutiny and made sense of it all. There is a God, who transcends the universe. That our lives transcend this life, that in fact we have eternal lives, for better or for worse.

I think most people have a worldview that is consistent with one of the three categories I listed above, whether they have really thought through what they believe is "the meaning to life" or not.

Those worldviews are going to dramatically shape how they view the world and the political views they have, among other things. I think it would be very difficult to get people who consciously or unconsciously have a worldview in the first category to agree on a lot of things with those who have a worldview that fits in category 3. And those with different religions are going to have potentially big differences of view with each other, at least on the issues where those worldviews diverge.