[continuing from this article]

That, precisely, is the truth of religion, or at least the truth of religious mythology: its capacity to point to its own (and everything's) insufficiency as an expression.  In this sense, the notion that the universe is an infinite pile of turtles is "truer" than the the most up-to-date scientific cosmology.  Then again, of course, from the perspective of an alien with a literally incomprehensibly deeper understanding of the universe, our scientific cosmology is so little advanced beyond the infinite pile of turtles that we can round any advance to zero.  So, the scientific cosmology is also just as "true" in the negative sense, the mythological sense.  It has the truth of myth.

I think the wisest elders in every culture have understood this.  Once one understands this, it flips all understanding upside down - or rather, right-side up.  It's not just that any given worldview is true with a grain of salt.  It's that every worldview is more than 99% salt.  How much more than 99%?  Well, one worldview (say, that the universe consists of an infinite stack of turtles) might be 99.999999... and then a series of thousands of nines, followed by an infinite string of random numbers... 73756293819061033..., whereas another worldview (say, that the universe consists mostly of dark energy that is causing dark matter and trillions of galaxies to expand faster than the speed of light) is 99.99999... and then thousands of nines, followed by a different infinite string of random numbers... percent salt.  They are different amounts of salt, but they can both be rounded to - all salt.  They are that close to each other, and that close to 100% salt.

This is not to say that we shouldn't be trying to reduce the salt.  We should.  But part of reducing the salt means accepting the fact that we'll probably never get our salt intake down below 99.99%.

 

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