Rose Colored Glases

"In order to find out how things really are, one must understand the filters through which one perceives the world."

Do you have rose-colored glasses on? Or do you see the smog that covers the skyline? Many people choose to overlook the reality of things. They view life through a filter that hides the truth. Others have an extreme cynicism towards anything. Everything we learn has a point of view from someone else attached to it. Every subject area is seen and taught in a different way. The way knowledge is passed down through different topics is also vastly different. Everything around us is a product of someone else's perception and, therefore, someone else's filter. This makes the things we learn unreliable. The only way to really know something is by looking at as many sides as possible. The more points of view you observe the more likely you are to get the real truth. The facts are skewed by every party that deals with them. Understanding each of these is probably one of the best assets a knowledge seeker can have.



History is one of the most biased subject areas. From ancient times we only have faded, yellowing paper that is written in languages that we can't fully understand. We may have an idea of the meaning but there are connotations that may only be relevant through the times. The Bible, for instance, is the most printed book in the world. People around the globe in almost every country use this book as a guide on how to be a good person. This book is accepted as the ultimate truth for millions of people yet the original book was written in a language so complex that nobody fully understands it today. Old Hebrew is literally a dead language, not because it is no longer used but because no one on the planet knows it anymore. From Old Hebrew the Bible was translated to Greek. This document is known as the Septuagint. People rarely think about this filter through time that the Bible has gone through, but it is there never the less. This causes the entire Christian following to look through the filter of translation. History is also a product of the winner's point of view on the event. The loser rarely gets a say-so in the matter that the story is told. The Civil War is a great example of this. The South is seen as the bad guy because the Northern victory is so glorified. No one really stops to think about the rights of the southern states to break off from the Union based on the same principles used for revolution only a century earlier. As someone learning history we see the event through the eyes of the winning team. All we know of the Persian Wars is the Greek account. This is because history is seen through the artifacts left behind. When a culture took over another they'd ruin records and decimate structures. We are taught about history through the remnants of what is left. This gives us a huge filter of the facts of our ancestors.