Entry 170 - The Subjective vs Objective Aspect in Life
12/29/19
In this post, I really want to go over these two ideas. Now in the Webster dictionary, these two words are defined as such:
Definition of Subjective:
1) Characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind.
2) Relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states.
3) Peculiar to a particular individual.
4) Modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background.
An example of this would be how you perceive the past presidents of the United States. Maybe you hated one president, or maybe you adored another. Another example is your personal journey with finding God. Subjective experiences are basically your perception governed by the knowledge you've attained throughout the years and the experiences you've gone through that cause you to think about things in a certain way.
Definition of Objective:
1) Expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings. Prejudices, or interpretations.
For example, on Sunday afternoon, you ate a block of cheese. That is a fact. There is no doubt about it. Or Friday at 8:00am a cyclist was cycling past my house. Or during Christmas carolers came to our door and sang songs. These are objective facts that have happened and are not distorted, or influenced by prejudices or interpretations.
Combining the Two:
Now, if we're combining the two, it would look like this:
Objective aspect: Ky ate a block of cheese.
Subjective aspect: Person A: I think it was selfish of Ky to eat the block of cheese because he left none for the family. Person B: I think it definitely was okay for Ky to eat the block of cheese because he was hungry. Person C: I think Ky was sending a message to others by eating the block of cheese. I think he wants us to realize that cheese represents happiness and abundance, and we should eat more cheese to have more happiness and abundance in our lives.
Must have been a pretty amazing block of cheese. Let's take Jesus crucifixion as another example and split it up into the subjective and objective aspects.
Objective aspect: Jesus died on the cross.
Subjective aspect: Person A: Jesus died on the cross to save all of humanity of their sins. Person B: Jesus died on the cross because he was a danger to society. He claimed to be the king of the Jews, to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, and he threatened other things and that made him unsafe to our people. Person C: Jesus died on the cross because he lied about being the messiah because he did not accomplish every single one of the prophecies before his death, such as uniting all the Jews, therefore he is not the true messiah and definitely should have died.
There is a historical fact (objective aspect) and then often an interpretation as to why that historical fact happened that is motivated by someone's inward perception of it (subjective aspect). The hard part about this is that within the Bible, there are instances that declare they are objective facts, and then there are even more subjective interpretations written within the Bible.
So knowledge is understanding the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, and wisdom is applying it properly. But you might say to me, "Well Ky, isn't most of the Bible subjective because one must have faith to believe God exists? And I would say yes, you're completely right! However, within a majority of subjectivity, there are events that did take place that were recorded in the Bible.
My point in writing this is to show the connection between your subjective experiences and other people's subjective experiences that wrote the Bible you hold in your hand today. I'm not saying that's bad or good, but I'm saying this is your reality. You don't know personally the people who wrote this. Frankly, you don't even know some of the actual authors of some of these books, yet you rest your faith in their stories. But with that same faith, so many are quick to condemn others who have faith in other people who had faith themselves, and then you condemn them to hell, even if the message is similar.
I point this out to make each of us think about how similar we might be to everyone else and to hopefully help us drop the us vs them mentality which has been the cause behind mass killings, evils, and more throughout the world. "They're a lesser race, so we have a right to kill them. They're not Christian, so we have a right to kill them. They're heretics so we have a right to kill them" and so on have been used so many times as justification to deploy heinous acts too disturbing to mention, so hopefully widening our view and seeing we all share a subjective perception from other people's subjective perceptions will help us realize we're not that different from our neighbors down the street. Then maybe one day, we can see our neighbors like God sees them, beautiful children that He deeply loves just as much as He loves you and me.
So back to the aspects: Many times when we do not have the archeological evidence of these stories recorded in the Bible, we must rely on faith, which makes that story now subjective to each person. Even though a lot of the events recorded in the Bible could for sure have happened with or without archeological evidence, it is also a fact that we won't know for sure without that external evidence that makes it an objective fact, and then we must rely on, or have faith, that these people are telling the truth. For example, if you had proof on tape that Rick's dog pooped on your lawn (objective fact) versus Tammy telling you that John saw Rick's dog poop on your lawn, but there's no literal evidence that John can give you to support his claim, just his word that he gave to Tammy that Tammy gave to you, and so you must rely on someone's perception from someone else's perception with no proof (subjective). The camera footage is by definition objective and is going to be more reliable than the other. Moving forward, that means if you trust Tammy's story, you'll have to compensate for the lack of evidence with faith and go off of that as personal proof. So you may believe Tammy is telling the truth and that John is telling the truth of what he saw, but without any evidence, you only have faith to rely on.
Or let's use a court case as another example to illustrate this: Say Bob was accused of running a red light. Then Witness A, who happens to be a cop, says in court he saw Bob run a red light. But then John, who wasn't even there, says he felt in his heart that Witness B, who was there when Bob ran the red light, is a good person and therefore a good witness, and believes the testimony of Witness B that Bob would never do such a thing because he is a good person in his heart. Obviously as the judge, you are going to believe Witness A over John, who wasn't even there! I mean it would've helped to have Witness B there testifying since at court, but even then, if Witness B goes to court but isn't going to relay the objective facts and only use his subjective perception of the character of Bob, then that also isn't a very good defense against Witness A!
So within the Bible, there are parts where we have Witness A with clear evidence, proof, historical and archeological evidence and so on to prove that these events indeed did happen. But then in many other portions of the Bible, we have Witness B's point of view, and we're John who believes that Witness B is a good person, and therefore we trust his testimony. The difference is, we don't know Witness B personally because he's been dead for some thousands of years so we're having faith that his writings are true even when we're not even sure if he wrote it or not, but it sounds like something he wrote, so we believe it anyway.
So the reality is, a plethora of what is written in the Bible that does not have historical evidence to back up the story is in turn more subjective than objective and that results in us having to believe subjectively that these stories were written correctly and did happen and are true, regardless of their level objectivity. This subjectivity goes even deeper into how different sects, groups and denominations conglomerate based off of shared subjective beliefs about how they choose to interpret the Bible.
Similarly, we have Christianity with a massive amount of unique point of views. We have strict fundamentalists, conservatives and progressive Christians. We have denominations springing into existence over a point of view designed to safeguard a particular doctrine (One must be baptized by immersion to be saved) and we have the most literal denominations that guard their point of view and defend it based off of the premise that they have the oldest tradition (such as the Catholics). What can we assume from this knowledge? There is already subjectivity within the stories of the Bible, and there is even more subjectivity between people in this day and age, which leads to a nice, long chain of subjectivity.
If it were strictly objective, it would be as plain, clear, and obvious as 2 + 2. Everyone with at least a base 5 system would agree that 2 + 2 = 4. There's no doubt about it. There's no saying, "Oh, but I feel like it is supposed to be a 1 because when you flip the 2's and put them on top of each other and straighten them out it looks like a heart, and each person has one heart. No! You would say that's nonsense to use that subjectivity for an objective fact. But then with the Bible we have hundreds of different verses, written by different authors, saying different things.
One person might choose to use Matthew 25:41-42: "Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink" as reasoning to why doing good works are necessary for one to be saved.
Then another person might use Paul's words in Ephesians 2:8 "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God" as reason to why you are saved not by works but by grace alone.
Then lastly Sharol might come out of nowhere and say you're both wrong and whip out this verse from John 3:5 "Jesus answered, 'Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit' and then tell you it is absolutely necessary to not only do good works, but be physically baptized by the correct priesthood authority to be able to enter the Kingdom of God, or else you're screwed sonny.
So then, what if you die before you're baptized? Or what if you die before you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord? If you go to all 44,000 different denominations, it'll be interesting to hear of each group's personal subjective beliefs regarding that, and then when you're done, get back to me because I'm curious about what each one says!
The ironic thing is they all read the same Scripture, but then you might ask, why are there so many point of views and not a consensus on these doctrines? And I would say, well look at the Bible and look at humanity. It would be different if the Bible was completely written from an objective point of view, but it isn't. It has elements of objectivity and subjectivity scattered all throughout.
Even though those verses talk about entrance into the Kingdom of God or salvation, you can see that people use subjectivity to create a connection between their desired doctrine and the verses they read, and that is why we have so many denominations. If every single verse in the Bible was black and white and talked about salvation like 2 + 2, then it would be a completely different story, but it sadly isn't like that.
So there is a combination of objective statements, but also numerous subjective statements as well. When someone tries to take a subjective statement from the Bible and make another subjective statement on top of that, and then try to pass that off as objective, I call that a chain of subjectivity. That can create conflict and confusion for the masses if they are not aware of what is happening. I'm going to try to break this down and hopefully this will you help one to pinpoint this in the future.
Let's use the cheese example. It's like taking this subjective statement about me and the cheese: "I think Ky was sending a message to others by eating the block of cheese. I think he wants us to realize that cheese represents happiness and abundance and we should eat more cheese to have more happiness and abundance in our lives"; and then I add even more subjectivity by saying "Because Ky ate the block of cheese, we have freedom to eat all the blocks of cheese and the happiness and abundance we get through eating the cheese will cause a new revival and everyone on earth will become cheese lovers and receive this happiness and abundance from that exact type of cheese he first ate."
So similarly with the Bible, people may take subjective verses, and create even more subjective perceptions, which then leads to a chain of subjectivity. So what ends up happening, is it's no longer built on what the Bible says, but now it's rooted in your own subjective perception of the Bible, that first came from someone else's subjective experience recorded in the Bible, and now we have a chain of subjectivity!
This chain of subjectivity is hidden within many religions, many denominations, many traditions and so forth. This chain is the excuse for strange doctrines to be the norm in certain denominations. For example, even though it says nowhere in the Bible to pray to the dead, there are Christian denominations who incorporate this not only at home, but within each church service! Or another example is when multiple Popes of the Catholic Church used the verses of the Old Testament where they believed God commanded the Jews to kill the unrighteous, as an excuse for the Catholic Church to go in and kill those they deemed unrighteous which included Muslims, unbelievers, and even other Christians that didn't meet with their church! Do you think these interpretations are justified? It makes for an interesting conversation.
In the end, I hope this blog post made you reconsider how much closer you are to everyone else. That same family who maybe doesn't read the Bible but another predominant subjective book also is trying their hardest to develop a relationship with God and be better than they were yesterday. Maybe be a little more open to those who seem different than you, and through that openness you'll realize that you actually have much more in common with them than you might have thought. Explore the world, look into cultures, study traditions, ask other religious people what their point of view is.
Be open to other people's subjective experiences, just as you are with your own self and those who had them within the Bible. Consider the deepness, the vastness, the interconnectedness we all share through God and try going a little deeper with each human. In the process, you might just discover a beautiful treasure within another human that looks very similar to yours.
In this post, I really want to go over these two ideas. Now in the Webster dictionary, these two words are defined as such:
Definition of Subjective:
1) Characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind.
2) Relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states.
3) Peculiar to a particular individual.
4) Modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background.
An example of this would be how you perceive the past presidents of the United States. Maybe you hated one president, or maybe you adored another. Another example is your personal journey with finding God. Subjective experiences are basically your perception governed by the knowledge you've attained throughout the years and the experiences you've gone through that cause you to think about things in a certain way.
Definition of Objective:
1) Expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings. Prejudices, or interpretations.
For example, on Sunday afternoon, you ate a block of cheese. That is a fact. There is no doubt about it. Or Friday at 8:00am a cyclist was cycling past my house. Or during Christmas carolers came to our door and sang songs. These are objective facts that have happened and are not distorted, or influenced by prejudices or interpretations.
Combining the Two:
Now, if we're combining the two, it would look like this:
Objective aspect: Ky ate a block of cheese.
Subjective aspect: Person A: I think it was selfish of Ky to eat the block of cheese because he left none for the family. Person B: I think it definitely was okay for Ky to eat the block of cheese because he was hungry. Person C: I think Ky was sending a message to others by eating the block of cheese. I think he wants us to realize that cheese represents happiness and abundance, and we should eat more cheese to have more happiness and abundance in our lives.
Must have been a pretty amazing block of cheese. Let's take Jesus crucifixion as another example and split it up into the subjective and objective aspects.
Objective aspect: Jesus died on the cross.
Subjective aspect: Person A: Jesus died on the cross to save all of humanity of their sins. Person B: Jesus died on the cross because he was a danger to society. He claimed to be the king of the Jews, to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, and he threatened other things and that made him unsafe to our people. Person C: Jesus died on the cross because he lied about being the messiah because he did not accomplish every single one of the prophecies before his death, such as uniting all the Jews, therefore he is not the true messiah and definitely should have died.
There is a historical fact (objective aspect) and then often an interpretation as to why that historical fact happened that is motivated by someone's inward perception of it (subjective aspect). The hard part about this is that within the Bible, there are instances that declare they are objective facts, and then there are even more subjective interpretations written within the Bible.
So knowledge is understanding the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, and wisdom is applying it properly. But you might say to me, "Well Ky, isn't most of the Bible subjective because one must have faith to believe God exists? And I would say yes, you're completely right! However, within a majority of subjectivity, there are events that did take place that were recorded in the Bible.
My point in writing this is to show the connection between your subjective experiences and other people's subjective experiences that wrote the Bible you hold in your hand today. I'm not saying that's bad or good, but I'm saying this is your reality. You don't know personally the people who wrote this. Frankly, you don't even know some of the actual authors of some of these books, yet you rest your faith in their stories. But with that same faith, so many are quick to condemn others who have faith in other people who had faith themselves, and then you condemn them to hell, even if the message is similar.
I point this out to make each of us think about how similar we might be to everyone else and to hopefully help us drop the us vs them mentality which has been the cause behind mass killings, evils, and more throughout the world. "They're a lesser race, so we have a right to kill them. They're not Christian, so we have a right to kill them. They're heretics so we have a right to kill them" and so on have been used so many times as justification to deploy heinous acts too disturbing to mention, so hopefully widening our view and seeing we all share a subjective perception from other people's subjective perceptions will help us realize we're not that different from our neighbors down the street. Then maybe one day, we can see our neighbors like God sees them, beautiful children that He deeply loves just as much as He loves you and me.
So back to the aspects: Many times when we do not have the archeological evidence of these stories recorded in the Bible, we must rely on faith, which makes that story now subjective to each person. Even though a lot of the events recorded in the Bible could for sure have happened with or without archeological evidence, it is also a fact that we won't know for sure without that external evidence that makes it an objective fact, and then we must rely on, or have faith, that these people are telling the truth. For example, if you had proof on tape that Rick's dog pooped on your lawn (objective fact) versus Tammy telling you that John saw Rick's dog poop on your lawn, but there's no literal evidence that John can give you to support his claim, just his word that he gave to Tammy that Tammy gave to you, and so you must rely on someone's perception from someone else's perception with no proof (subjective). The camera footage is by definition objective and is going to be more reliable than the other. Moving forward, that means if you trust Tammy's story, you'll have to compensate for the lack of evidence with faith and go off of that as personal proof. So you may believe Tammy is telling the truth and that John is telling the truth of what he saw, but without any evidence, you only have faith to rely on.
Or let's use a court case as another example to illustrate this: Say Bob was accused of running a red light. Then Witness A, who happens to be a cop, says in court he saw Bob run a red light. But then John, who wasn't even there, says he felt in his heart that Witness B, who was there when Bob ran the red light, is a good person and therefore a good witness, and believes the testimony of Witness B that Bob would never do such a thing because he is a good person in his heart. Obviously as the judge, you are going to believe Witness A over John, who wasn't even there! I mean it would've helped to have Witness B there testifying since at court, but even then, if Witness B goes to court but isn't going to relay the objective facts and only use his subjective perception of the character of Bob, then that also isn't a very good defense against Witness A!
So within the Bible, there are parts where we have Witness A with clear evidence, proof, historical and archeological evidence and so on to prove that these events indeed did happen. But then in many other portions of the Bible, we have Witness B's point of view, and we're John who believes that Witness B is a good person, and therefore we trust his testimony. The difference is, we don't know Witness B personally because he's been dead for some thousands of years so we're having faith that his writings are true even when we're not even sure if he wrote it or not, but it sounds like something he wrote, so we believe it anyway.
So the reality is, a plethora of what is written in the Bible that does not have historical evidence to back up the story is in turn more subjective than objective and that results in us having to believe subjectively that these stories were written correctly and did happen and are true, regardless of their level objectivity. This subjectivity goes even deeper into how different sects, groups and denominations conglomerate based off of shared subjective beliefs about how they choose to interpret the Bible.
Similarly, we have Christianity with a massive amount of unique point of views. We have strict fundamentalists, conservatives and progressive Christians. We have denominations springing into existence over a point of view designed to safeguard a particular doctrine (One must be baptized by immersion to be saved) and we have the most literal denominations that guard their point of view and defend it based off of the premise that they have the oldest tradition (such as the Catholics). What can we assume from this knowledge? There is already subjectivity within the stories of the Bible, and there is even more subjectivity between people in this day and age, which leads to a nice, long chain of subjectivity.
If it were strictly objective, it would be as plain, clear, and obvious as 2 + 2. Everyone with at least a base 5 system would agree that 2 + 2 = 4. There's no doubt about it. There's no saying, "Oh, but I feel like it is supposed to be a 1 because when you flip the 2's and put them on top of each other and straighten them out it looks like a heart, and each person has one heart. No! You would say that's nonsense to use that subjectivity for an objective fact. But then with the Bible we have hundreds of different verses, written by different authors, saying different things.
One person might choose to use Matthew 25:41-42: "Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink" as reasoning to why doing good works are necessary for one to be saved.
Then another person might use Paul's words in Ephesians 2:8 "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God" as reason to why you are saved not by works but by grace alone.
Then lastly Sharol might come out of nowhere and say you're both wrong and whip out this verse from John 3:5 "Jesus answered, 'Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit' and then tell you it is absolutely necessary to not only do good works, but be physically baptized by the correct priesthood authority to be able to enter the Kingdom of God, or else you're screwed sonny.
So then, what if you die before you're baptized? Or what if you die before you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord? If you go to all 44,000 different denominations, it'll be interesting to hear of each group's personal subjective beliefs regarding that, and then when you're done, get back to me because I'm curious about what each one says!
The ironic thing is they all read the same Scripture, but then you might ask, why are there so many point of views and not a consensus on these doctrines? And I would say, well look at the Bible and look at humanity. It would be different if the Bible was completely written from an objective point of view, but it isn't. It has elements of objectivity and subjectivity scattered all throughout.
Even though those verses talk about entrance into the Kingdom of God or salvation, you can see that people use subjectivity to create a connection between their desired doctrine and the verses they read, and that is why we have so many denominations. If every single verse in the Bible was black and white and talked about salvation like 2 + 2, then it would be a completely different story, but it sadly isn't like that.
So there is a combination of objective statements, but also numerous subjective statements as well. When someone tries to take a subjective statement from the Bible and make another subjective statement on top of that, and then try to pass that off as objective, I call that a chain of subjectivity. That can create conflict and confusion for the masses if they are not aware of what is happening. I'm going to try to break this down and hopefully this will you help one to pinpoint this in the future.
Let's use the cheese example. It's like taking this subjective statement about me and the cheese: "I think Ky was sending a message to others by eating the block of cheese. I think he wants us to realize that cheese represents happiness and abundance and we should eat more cheese to have more happiness and abundance in our lives"; and then I add even more subjectivity by saying "Because Ky ate the block of cheese, we have freedom to eat all the blocks of cheese and the happiness and abundance we get through eating the cheese will cause a new revival and everyone on earth will become cheese lovers and receive this happiness and abundance from that exact type of cheese he first ate."
So similarly with the Bible, people may take subjective verses, and create even more subjective perceptions, which then leads to a chain of subjectivity. So what ends up happening, is it's no longer built on what the Bible says, but now it's rooted in your own subjective perception of the Bible, that first came from someone else's subjective experience recorded in the Bible, and now we have a chain of subjectivity!
This chain of subjectivity is hidden within many religions, many denominations, many traditions and so forth. This chain is the excuse for strange doctrines to be the norm in certain denominations. For example, even though it says nowhere in the Bible to pray to the dead, there are Christian denominations who incorporate this not only at home, but within each church service! Or another example is when multiple Popes of the Catholic Church used the verses of the Old Testament where they believed God commanded the Jews to kill the unrighteous, as an excuse for the Catholic Church to go in and kill those they deemed unrighteous which included Muslims, unbelievers, and even other Christians that didn't meet with their church! Do you think these interpretations are justified? It makes for an interesting conversation.
In the end, I hope this blog post made you reconsider how much closer you are to everyone else. That same family who maybe doesn't read the Bible but another predominant subjective book also is trying their hardest to develop a relationship with God and be better than they were yesterday. Maybe be a little more open to those who seem different than you, and through that openness you'll realize that you actually have much more in common with them than you might have thought. Explore the world, look into cultures, study traditions, ask other religious people what their point of view is.
Be open to other people's subjective experiences, just as you are with your own self and those who had them within the Bible. Consider the deepness, the vastness, the interconnectedness we all share through God and try going a little deeper with each human. In the process, you might just discover a beautiful treasure within another human that looks very similar to yours.
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