2026-08-28
Ok, I admit it, this title is designed to make you pause, to consider whether the question even has any validity, to encourage your independent thought.
My first reaction (speaking personally) would be, if pushed, "First, define 'God' ". Absent a proper understanding of the question, it's obvious (axiomatic if you're a mathematician) that it cannot be properly and fully answered if it cannot be properly and fully understood. And so we encounter the first and most debilitating aspect that ultimately bedevils arguments both political and religious - nobody defines exactly what they are talking about and thus everybody probably spends a huge percentage of time and effort either clarifying the uncertainties raised by their understanding of the wording, or by ignoring the problem and arguing at crossed purposes.
Probably without even realising it.
Truly to err is human, and confusion over the meaning of words is undoubtedly fundamental to a lot of it.
Take for example "Safe and effective". What does that mean? Safe for whom? Effective at what?
Safe for the producer (who cannot be sued) and effective for producer profits (more or less guaranteed by governments)?
Another example. "Inherently unsafe" which was used to describe the same product type to (allegedly) Ronald Reagan when he asked why they couldn't make their product safer so that the proposed legislation would be unnecessary.
Well, is it "safe and effective" or is it "inherently unsafe"? Or both at the same time? Can we even answer such a question posed without the necessary clarifications?!
People divide themselves into camps without ever fully understanding the meaning of the labels affixed to those camps. For example, "Left" and "Right". Which is handy for politicians who can over time "refine" (ie: massage) the unstated definitions of what each label actually means. Politics becomes flexible and politicians ever more so. The people can then spend ever more time and effort fruitlessly arguing the toss about which is better or worse without ever resolving the unresolvable, so they end up voting tribally. Do we like the result?
Twas ever thus, so what to do?
Maybe forget the labels and talk about the actual policies and their likely effects. It wouldn't be a panacea but I'd settle for an improvement - "the insistence on perfection is the enemy of progress".
Progress takes experiential trial and error. And the associated learning! Those who don't want to take part may step aside, nobody should be forced to into activities for which they lack the aptitude; that would not be to anybody's advantage.
And if you think this argument is all too much abstraction, wait til you read Martin Geddes' soliloquy on the state of the world and how we got here. It's a tour de force and takes abstraction to a whole new (and in my view very welcome) level, as it has the effect of locating most people somewhere on the spectrum that has helplessness at one end and an adequate-understanding-of-where-they-should-be-going-from-here at the other.
(Only if you wish to of course 😎)
All informed by his personal "journey".
All I can say is "Thank you for sharing!". There's not enough of you.
