While we all conceptually understand that there is bias in everything, it must be a context that is taken into account with every reading. Why is that? Well if you don't take into account the bias of any given author, you naturally give credence to (or accept) any assumption that the author walks in with before even putting words on a page. That is dangerous. We all learn in school that even journalism, arguably objective reporting, will have bias. A liberal, atheist, vegan will approach everything (from education to abortion to women's rights to entertainment) very differently than a conservative, theist, hunter. We might jokingly say that then all journalism should be only attempted by moderates, but that's not the point. Everyone believes something, and that something colors how they perceive the world around them, and that perceived color will impact how we act.
In this blog, I want to consider a lot of the questions that maybe get overlooked because they are so fundamental. Perhaps because they are so fundamental, they are not really practical to consider outside of a philosophy class or something, because they don't pragmatically get us anywhere. It's difficult to draw on how it immediately impacts our day-to-day. However, just because it doesn't change the ins and outs of our daily lives (e.g. grocery shopping, paying rent, going to work, etc...) doesn't mean that it's not important. I've found that in order to change any of the day to day, we need to begin with a paradigm shift. I want us to be able to flesh out the assumptions that we just naturally assume, why we might assume them, and whether or not those assumptions are valid. It's a simple exercise to explain but perhaps significantly more difficult to accomplish. However, I think we ought not be daunted by that difficulty, rather we should take that challenge to really examine our lives, how we live, and why we live that way.
I wanted to have this post here simply to give everyone a certain amount of context of where I'm coming from. Given the topics we will be considering (namely, life, its meaning and other related topics) I want you as the reader to understand where I am coming from. Fundamentally, we carry in certain beliefs or assumptions (however you want to designate them) and they apply to everything we perceive and every decision we make. There is dichotomy for some of us perhaps because the world today has asked us to separate what we "believe" with what "reality" dictates we do. In other words, what I say I believe doesn't necessarily have to align with any action that I take.
So before I get off on another tangent, a little background and context about me to help you understand where I am coming from. I am a Christian. That means in broad terms I am a theist and I believe in the authority of Bible. To further extrapolate that, it means that I believe in the God of the Bible and personage and Godhood of Jesus as described in the Bible. I believe that the Bible is God's Word given to man and therefore describes the best way for man to live and flourish because God loves man (I'll probably have a post about this, it's dense, I know). There are a lot of little things that I won't get into that kind of branch out from this initial assertion, we'll probably discuss them further in future posts. While I love writing, my background is in accounting, in which I hold both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree, so I am educated. I am 2nd generation Asian American, my parents immigrated to the US for graduate school, this is cultural context, and to give a little more color, I grew up in what could only be designated as an upper-middle class family. Finally, I was born in the 80s, so I guess that makes me a millennial, though that sounds weird when I actually say it.
I know I'd probably get more page hits if I had made this a blog to feature my witty basketball analysis or maybe an in-depth play-through review of some video games or even about books. However, this isn't really about clicks, it's about dialogue, which I hope we can have, civilly. And most importantly, it's about thinking, ultimately the question I want this blog to help us consider, is "What am I doing here?" As Socratese once said, "An unconsidered life is not worth living." We really need to do more considering.
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