Following a scathing backlash of yesterday’s post about hip new neologisms, I feel it is necessary to explain to certain intelligences lesser in extent than my own about the flowing, ever-changing nature of time and its relation to dinosaurs. Rather, I will make the preceding point and leave the workings of its implications as an exercise for the reader, especially that reader who made such disparaging and ill-conceived pronouncements without sufficient forethought or foresight. However, I cannot in good conscience be too severely critical, for we all would believe that we have more knowledge than we really do, especially on subjects that to us seem stupid or nonsensical; it is a basic fact of human nature that we love to condemn things that we do not understand.

With this in mind, then, it seems that Emerson was wrong when he said, “Our chief aim in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.” Although certainly good advice, I postulate that our chief aim is instead to learn to love that which we don’t understand. Nobody hates that which he understands, for to comprehend is to assimilate, and a thing, once assimilated, becomes your own. “No one hates his own body”. (Ephesians 5:29) Loving something you don’t understand is a high and noble goal, and it is fearfully and terrifyingly difficult. Everyone believes that he and those he runs with are Right. It is no challenge to do this, because it is Man’s default state.

Loving what you don’t understand is precisely what Jesus meant when he talked about loving your enemy. Clearly your enemy is your enemy because you and he do not understand each other. Your enemy is under the impression that he is right, and you are under the impression that you are; these goals are in conflict and thus you are enemies.¹ But if you can get over yourself and make allowances that there are things worth loving that you do not grasp, you can bridge this to loving your enemies, and when you have done that you have really achieved something worthwhile. And you will have a lot fewer enemies besides.

Having said that, I should rescind my initial statement about a certain figure and the relative level of his intelligence, for that condescension was made out of a lack of knowledge. Now I can see that, while I have no more knowledge than before, I can make considerations for differences in opinion. One must be careful, though, for to travel that path too far leads to relative truth, and that is not a place you want to end up in. It would be easy to extrapolate this to say, “I do not understand you sir, therefore I cannot condemn what you do” and arrive at the conclusion that what is right for me is not necessarily what is right for you. Yet there IS absolute truth, for the nature of Truth is such that it precludes two opposing things from being true. It is possible to love through justice; one has only to look at the Cross for an example.

So. The moral of the story? Make strides toward understanding other people and other things. And when you can’t, love them/it instead. For they both end up in the same place.

^1.It is possible, of course, that your enemy is such simply because he is cruel, but then you cannot really blame him: the workings of his mind are faulty and he is more akin to a crazy person and deserves your sympathy and pity for his plight (for it seems obvious that normal people are not indifferent to the pain they cause others, which is what cruelty is).

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