by Raffy Gutierrez
Serialized in full, every week, free — right here in The City Post. Week 2. Chapter 2.
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Chapter 2: What Do You Know? What Do You Believe? What Are You Merely Assuming?
Last week we established one idea: the map is not the territory. The Church drew a map of your marriage five hundred years ago. The territory — your actual life, your actual family, your actual pain — was ordered to conform to the map’s lines, not the other way around.
This week we go one level deeper. Because before we can talk about what the Church told you, we need to talk about how you know what you know.
Three questions. Simple ones. Deceptively simple.
What do you know?
What do you believe?
What are you merely assuming?
Most people, if you asked them, would treat these three questions as roughly the same question. They are not. They are three entirely different categories of thought — and confusing them is exactly how five hundred years of institutional indoctrination works.
Let’s separate them.
What you know is what you can verify. It has evidence. It can be tested. It can, in principle, be proven wrong — and if it can’t be proven wrong, it isn’t knowledge. It’s something else. The sun rises in the east. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level. The Catholic Church did not require a priest at weddings for the first thousand years of Christianity. These are things you can check. Knowledge lives here.
What you believe is different. Belief does not require evidence in the same way. You can believe in God without being able to prove God’s existence in a laboratory. That is the nature of faith, and there is nothing wrong with it. The problem is not belief. The problem is when belief is mistaken for knowledge — when something that has never been verified is treated as if it has been, and when anyone who asks for the verification is accused of attacking the belief itself.
What you are merely assuming is the most dangerous category of all. Because assumptions are invisible. You don’t know you’re making them. They sit underneath your thinking like floorboards — so familiar, so load-bearing, that you never think to look at them. You just walk on them every day and trust that they will hold.
Here is an assumption most Filipinos have never examined: that the Catholic Church’s position on marriage is ancient, unchanging, and beyond the reach of ordinary human scrutiny.
It feels like knowledge. It has the weight of knowledge. Five hundred years of repetition will do that to an idea. But it is not knowledge. It has never been verified. It has only been repeated — by people who were told by people who were told by people who were told, stretching back to a moment when a group of men in sixteenth-century Europe decided that their reading of one Gospel verse should govern the intimate lives of every human being on earth, forever.
That is not knowledge. That is an assumption so old it has forgotten it is an assumption.
This is what the philosopher Karl Popper meant when he argued that a belief system which cannot be falsified — which cannot, even in principle, be proven wrong — is not knowledge. It is dogma. And dogma, however sincerely held, is not the same thing as truth.
And this is what Russell Hardin called crippled epistemology — the condition of knowing only what you have been told to know, by sources that were selected precisely because they would never tell you anything different. A person raised inside a closed information system is not stupid. They are not weak. They are simply working with an incomplete map. And they have been told, repeatedly, that the map is complete.
Here is the question this chapter is asking you to sit with:
When you think about marriage — about divorce, about annulment, about what God wants for your family — which category are you operating in?
Are you working from something you have actually examined? Something you could, if pressed, point to evidence for?
Or are you walking on floorboards you have never once thought to test?
Most of us, if we are honest, are walking on floorboards. That is not a shame. That is a human condition. The shame would be in refusing to look down when someone finally asks you to.
The three questions — What do I know? What do I believe? What am I merely assuming? — are not an attack on your faith. They are the minimum requirement for thinking like a free person.
Rizal knew this. He spent his life trying to hand these questions to a nation that had been trained, for three centuries, to treat Spanish authority the way we now treat Catholic doctrine — as ground rather than map, as territory rather than drawing.
We built him a monument. We declared a holiday. We stopped reading what he wrote.
This book is an attempt to read it.
— End of Chapter 2 —
Next week: Chapter 3 — The Four Forms of Extremism. A diagnostic framework that puts a religious leader and a religious extremist on the same chart — and explains why that comparison is not as provocative as it sounds. Free, in full, every week, right here in The City Post. If this made you think, share it with someone who needs to.
Raffy Gutierrez writes a weekly column on politics, religion, and civil society. The views expressed are solely his own.
