Meaning From Experience

Here’s another didactic little story
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness
One of the guys is religious
The other is an atheist
And the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer
And the atheist says
Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God
It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing
Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard
And I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing
And it was 50 below
And so I tried it
I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out
‘Oh, God, if there is a God’
‘I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me’
And now, in the bar
The religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled
‘Well then you must believe now’ he says
‘After all’
‘Here you are’
‘Alive’

The atheist just rolls his eyes
‘No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.’

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis
The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people
Given those people’s two different belief templates
And two different ways of constructing meaning from experience

[Chorus]
Experience
Meaning from experience
Experience
Meaning from experience
Experience
Experience
Meaning from experience

Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief
Nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true
And the other guy’s is false or bad
Which is fine
Except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from
Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys
As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world
And the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired
Like height or shoe-size
Or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language
As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of
Personal
Intentional
Choice

Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance
The nonreligious guy is so totally certain
In his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help

True
There are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists
At least to most of us
But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever
Blind certainty
A close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up

The point here
Is that I think this is one part
Of what
Teaching me how to think
Is really supposed to mean
To be just a little less arrogant
To have just a little
Critical awareness about myself and my certainties
Because a huge percentage
Of stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out
Totally wrong
And deluded
I have learned this the hard way
As I predict you graduates will, too

Meaning from experience
Meaning from experience

[Chorus]
Experience
Meaning from experience
Experience
Experience
Meaning from experience

[Faded]
Meaning from experience
Meaning from experience
Experience
Meaning from experience
Experience
Experience
Meaning from experience