Metaphysical Musings

One of the gravest issues with studying and applying logic is that rarely does life fall neatly into syllogisms. How often do I look at an argument on abortion, feminism, racism, the death penalty, christianity, the existence of God, warfare and think to myself, "ahhhh, if we take axiom A to be true, then B, and if B is true, C must be true, so if A then C.
These are too simplistic as representative of reality. More often than not, we end up with a situation where:
if A,B,C,D....n1, n2..., then (B1, C1, and D1 or E1) or (B2, C2, E2) or maybe (D3, C4). Even in the first clause of our logic tree, we've run into a problem with branching, and indeterministic branching. A lot of simple arguments you see in social media use fast hasty generalizations, red herrings, strawman arguments, and slippery slope methods that tend to argue inductively rather than deductively. The reason for this is, we cannot prove many of these aethereal arguments - it's like grasping tendrils of fog and dragging clouds around as fortifications.
But as impossible as this sounds, people do it all the time. We've constructed cloudy castle walls, and hunker behind our false fortifications with smug satisfaction at our intellectual theft. But the puzzle pieces don't fit, and we don't probe too deeply  into our own beliefs, because letting down our guard might bring us to the realization that there is little actual truth holding these battlements up.
I remember a friend saying something that stuck with me: the greatest thing I ever learned was intellectual humility. (paraphrased) The understanding that you know very little of the truth of everything, and that examination is a prerequisite of wisdom, and doubt isn't necessarily the lack of faith, but perhaps the pursuit of it.
English is a strange language. We have countless words, but so few where it matters. We are stuck with singular words like "love" to define the countless emotions associated with relationships; words like doubt and fear to discuss our relationships with God - hardly incidental that in a culture starved for relationship and fraught with individualistic capitalism, the words our language suffers a dearth of are found in this locale. We've create a God who is our friend, mother, father, sister, brother, buddy, gentle teacher, because these are the things we don't understand.
And these are the truths we clothe ourselves in are as moth-infested and tattered as street-rags and we stubbornly pretend the cold doesn't affect our version of reality.