A Lesson in Listening

I’m doing this in light of the fact I shoud be studying for a  Media Ethics final, but I’d rather not….it’s too unethical to study for ethics.  Anyways…

When somneone tells you to “listen up”, one would generally associate it with hearing what they’re gonna say.  Then how could a deaf person ever “listen up” if they can’t hear.  Well you don’t hear to listen…listening is something that can be done with all five (or six) senses.  Listening is simply understanding what is going on.

Let’s take someone who speaks only Swahili and tell him to hear what we say.  He’ll never be able to listen to what we say…he only hears sounds dissociated with his language of comprehension.

Now, a deaf man is in a forest.  He hears nothing, but sees trees swaying.  He therefore has listened with his eyes, though he never heard the sounds of the breeze in the trees.  If a blind man touches the trees, he can feel the swaying of the tree, therefore, the blind man has listened to the feel of the tree and understood that it was swaying in the wind.

If you blindfold yourself and eat sugar, you listen to the taste and understand it’s sugar.  If you smell a pizza, you know it’s a pizza.  Without any object or idea that you have nothing to associate with, you will never be able to comprehend, and therefore, never be able to completely “listen” to it.

I’ve lived my life hearing people say “God never speaks to me…he never tells something”.  If someone knew how to truly listen, they would understand that God is always speaking to them, but not necessarily using words, and if you’ve seen Dogma, you would understand that if God spoke directly to you, you’re head would explode into millions of pieces.  God has been speaking to you since the day you were born, but without being able to understand the road he has laid out for you, you would never figure out that he has been speaking to you.

As a catholic, I was always told that creationism is the only way the earth was created. Seven days, seven nights…the whole nine yards.  Ehh….maybe.  As a skeptic, I have reason to beleive in evolution, natural selection, and so on and so forth.  These two paths have never been accepted as maybe being coordinated in some way, and I’m not saying they are, but that can’t generally be ruled out.  God has used this as a way to tesst your faith in him.  If you beleive in evolution, you’re not neccessarily anti-christ, but it’s more about thinking outside the religious box.

So, in closing, i don’t beleive entirely in coincidence.  I believe in coincidence with a purpose.  God laid out something, and it’s my job to understand what he’s trying to tell me