Philosophy Assignment

As I sit here on Monday night, snacking on some wasabi and soy almonds and drinking a herbal tea, I am working on a writting assignment due tomorrow. We were posted the questions:

1. What is one thing you know for sure?
and
2. Why do I know that for sure?

It is something I have pondered on many times in the past. There are little things that I know for sure....the sky is blue, that I live in San Francisco, that one day I will die. But I took this more on a path of what do I know for sure about thinking, not just of myself, but of the masses. And this is what I came up with. It ended up being something of a reasoning on religion.......


Travis J. Holasek
Phil 4
Mr. Graves
January 19, 2009

One Thing I Know for Sure


This is a incredibly interesting question that you posed to us and something that I have thought about many times. There are things that I thought I knew for sure, but as I got older and wiser and started questioning what I thought I knew, I realized they were ideas that were taught to me. They were ideas that I was warned against questioning. They were ideas that if I did question, if I allowed too much free thought, then the reality of the ideas were soon lost to reason. And those who imprinted these ideas lost control of my thinking and soon lost me to the reality of the ‘real’ world.

So what do I know for sure? I know that a lot of my earlier years were lost to this ‘controlled’ thinking. I know that it is something that I regret. But I also know that without it, I wouldn’t have been shaped into the brilliant student that I am today.

But I think what I want to say that I DO know for sure is this. That life is full of questions and answers. And that if we allow ourselves to be tied down to a way of thinking in which we are not actually thinking, but are lazy in mind and allow others to do that thinking for us. That if we allow others to make our decisions we give up our greatest trait, free thought and reasoning. And once we lose this free thought, we lose our humanity, and in turn we lose our world.

And why do I know this? All we have to do is look at the religions that are in place to do the thinking for the masses. Karl Marx is the one who stated “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” They cause a mass societal dreamy and euphoric sense. One caused by stories retold to us over the centuries to give people something more pleasing to focus on. Relying on an idea or a myth as it is so well described in Rollo May’s book The Cry for Myth. But once we take notice that we can rely on our free thought and fix the problems and not try to just cover them over, the world becomes a much kinder place not only for society on the whole, but in our own minds.

I left it in a state of undone. This is a piece that I am going to revisit and revise several times I am sure.