Reason, Experience, And The Existence Of God

[Hamba Tuhan]

I vividly remember trying to "learn my colors" and having trouble with the names for red and orange and confusing them. I think that is a blessing as well.

 

You would have been right at home, then, in Indonesian, which has no word for orange. Objects that English speakers would label 'orange' are either red or yellow or gold. On an island where I did some research as a masters student, none of the local languages have words for blue or green. Instead they have a single term. Point at the sky and ask people there what colour it is. Then point at the grass and ask the same question. The answer will be the same for both questions. I remember asking someone, Can you really not see that the sky and the grass are not the same colour? But no, he couldn't see that. They are just two shades of the exact same colour. And then my Russian friend Igor laughs at me because I think that the sky and my jeans are just two different shades of the same colour, whereas in Russian they are two different colours with completely different names.

[mfbukowski]

You would have been right at home, then, in Indonesian, which has no word for orange. Objects that English speakers would label 'orange' are either red or yellow or gold. On an island where I did some research as a masters student, none of the local languages have words for blue or green. Instead they have a single term. Point at the sky and ask people there what colour it is. Then point at the grass and ask the same question. The answer will be the same for both questions. I remember asking someone, Can you really not see that the sky and the grass are not the same colour? But no, he couldn't see that. They are just two shades of the exact same colour. And then my Russian friend Igor laughs at me because I think that the sky and my jeans are just two different shades of the same colour, whereas in Russian they are two different colours with completely different names.

Fantastic!  Thanks for that!

[mfbukowski]

This really is the most bottom of bottom lines for me:

 

All we can think or know or believe was organized by a human mind, and that includes this sentence.

Like it or not, we cannot ever get outside of what our mind and our collective human minds have organized.

 

The beauty of this is that for Mormons, God is a glorified Human.  To see color is in some way to be a very tiny god.
 

Edited December 3, 2014 by mfbukowski

[Ahab]

But one could just as easily argue that neither was right because neither saw it as it "really is". But the bottom line is that there IS no "really is" at least on this side of the veil, because all we have are different perspectives and different words to interpret those perspectives

That type of thinking bugs me, because like you just said in the preceding paragraph, both of them saw what really is, albeit from different perspectives. And that's what we need to keep in mind when we or others try to share what is seen, that what they are sharing is their own perspective. Nobody actually refutes reality. All we can do is see what we see, and hear what we hear, and touch/feel what we touch/feel, and taste what we taste, and basically sense what we sense whether just keeping our perspective to ourselves or trying to share our perspective with others, and others in turn get what they get while sometimes not getting what others try to share with them.