Reflections

Reason and experience are inseparable. Without reason to sort, analyze and classify our experiences, we do not turn this information into intelligence. We use reason to compare our latest experiences to our own earlier experiences and to the experiences others have shared with us. Without reason, experience is just raw data, not useful for much.

But reason does not operate in a vacuum. Reason cannot function without data. Experience is the way we gather data to feed our reasoning minds. Reason needs food for thought.

I was raised like many in America. I went to church. I come from a tiny town of 250 souls in rural Illinois. I lived a block from the church. Of course I went to church. And when we moved to the country, we went to the closest church, which was four miles away. When I got my license I drove all the kids to church. It was a Southern Baptist mission. And we learned about Jesus. I wanted so much to be saved. I went through the motions. I tried to convince myself I was saved. I was baptized, of course.

Then I went away to college. Reason began to matter more than what I had been taught. I began to experience things that a youngster in rural Illinois does not get to experience. I applied reason to those experiences, and reason told me that many of my early experiences did not make sense in the harsh light of mature reason. I began to question why I ever had believed the things I had been taught as a child.

As I grew in experience and honed my reasoning skills I discovered gaps in my experience. Reason directed my search to discover replacement beliefs for the childhood beliefs that had withered and crumbled under the harsh light of reason. Reason had taken away those old, comforting beliefs. It was up to reason to find a replacement. Life has to have meaning, doesn’t it? My search led east to Buddhism, Zen, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism. The east was not a good fit. I turned west.

More experience. More reason. I became a voracious reader and consumed massive amounts of information. Experience and reason. The search continued. I married, started a family, settled on a career, rose through the ranks. I lost a brother, a sister, my father, my mother and countless older relatives. Life was moving on, whether I was ready or not.

When did I come to Deism? I cannot rightly say. It was many years ago after much reasoning and experience. When did I realize I was a Deist? That is a relatively recent experience.

Here we are again, back at experience and reason. There was a time when I would have said, “Too bad I did not come to this conclusion earlier.” But that was when I believed in regrets. Regret is like worry, a complete waste of time and energy. Regret does not fix anything. Regret does not solve anything. We either learn from our experiences, or we do not. If we reason, we learn. If we fail to apply reason to our experiences, we learn nothing. Regret is unreasonable.

Because of reason and a mature perspective, I now get a lot more out of my experiences. I also get more out of other people’s experiences. I better understand the relationship between reason and experience, and life makes more sense. I have no regrets that I arrived at this understanding relatively late in life. Many people never reach this stage in their spiritual development at all!