About the Truth

So...after a long hiatus, I type again...the strange typer, not often prone to posting.....

A few things have got me thinking lately, mostly about the Truth. I use a capital T when I write Truth because I firmly believe that there is, and can be, only one Truth. Everything else is but smoke and mirrors, half truths, dim pieces of the truth, or 99.9% truth with just one, teency, weency little bit of untruth in it (Like the snake's "You will be as God", but that's another story). But in short, anything that is not the Truth is not worth shaking your finger at, yet we seem to have to do that on a daily basis.

Most of this comes in the form of philosophy. Don't get me wrong, philosophy can be cool. Something of the concepts are really intriguing and are worth looking at and puzzling over. Some are just plain cockamamey BS that is just some old farts way of confusing everyone else into thinking that he's a smart man because he can come up with some "enlightened" point of view. I had a coworker the other day try to point one of those guys out to me. (Disclaimer: Philosophy in modern times, and in the eastern cultures tends to lack concrete logic because they're a bunch of pansies and hate to make decisions. So if you get turned around, it's ok - that's what they want to happen.)

It's lunch time, and somehow or another a new coworker of mine and I get into a semi-philosophical discussion. It's not really worth calling it a debate because you can't really do that with some of these modern philosophy students - they can't deal in facts because everything is relative (and for some reason they don't understand that Einstien's general theory of relativity only applies to physics, and not to logic or philosophy) and so you can't debate with them, because that requires facts and logic. He asks me this question to try and illustrate the whole concept of relativity within philosophy and personal beliefs, and that there cannot be, in essence concrete right or wrong, or any sort of absolutes. This was the question -

"If a river is constantly moving, do you ever step into the same river twice? Or do you even ever step into the river?"

Now, honestly, this is probably the closest thing to a time wasting rhetorical question that I've ever heard, but like I've said before that's the entire point of it. To get you thinking so much that it hurts and nothing makes sense at all. At that point you are free to say that down is really up, and that left is really right and that the sky really is green (ok maybe not that the sky is green, although some people who are colorblind can say that, I think, but I digress). In any case you either get into the circular logic that it leads to, or you just dismiss it a pure, mindless confusing drivel. When taken to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning gets you wondering, that because the individual atoms in a wall or desk move, regardless of how slow the movement is (and we're talking really slow) "Is the wall I look at when I'm lying in bed really the same wall, or is it even really there?" That might just give me cause to try and walk straight through a wall.

However this is where facts and reality - not some lofty, ivory tower, mystical line of reasoning - must take over. I know from experience that a wall is really there - I can still sort of feel the knuckle on my right hand where I punched holes in two different sheet-rock walls when I was living in Trumbull, CT. Or when I hit my head on a cannon when I was two years old. They're real objects, and they do leave marks (I still have a scar from that cannon, maybe that's why I don't like West Point...) What's even funnier is that these same people that espouse this line of thinking are the exact same people that will turn to science to try and prove that they're right because science "disproves" the evidence of a creator. Now what strange is that science, the very thing they turn to, seeking to get a pass because it disproves something is, is based on something that is in direct contradiction to what they believe. Science deals in absolutes -whether theories or not - because science seeks to get a right answer, and disprove a wrong one.

So I replied to my coworker (by the way, I work at bank as a teller) with another question. "Are there no absolutes?" Which, as most logic and philosophy students would quickly say is a paradoxial statement. In saying there are no absolutes, you are making an absolute statement, which promptly contridicts itself, making it illogical. To this he promptly replies, "You can't make that statement because I don't deal in absolutes." Or something to that effect. Saying that each person might have their own "absolutes" and that each person's right and wrong was ok for that person. Commenting that even what Hitler did was, ok, because "It was what Hitler thought was right." Now I know that a lot of you who are reading this now are wondering how someone could say that. Very easily - they've bought into the smoke and mirrors truth that there is no truth but your own, and they like it because it lets them do whatever they want with impunity - though it can make for a very confuzzeld world, bordering on anarchy...

The other thing was this recent spat with some muslims about some cartoons that a Danis newspaper printed back in September of 2005. Now I have looked at the political cartoons, which are different artists interpretation of the great figure of Isalm, Mohammed. Now, according to Islamic law, (and I'm not talking about Sharia law) You cannot make an image of the prophet mohammed, although in many early writings and artifacts from the Arabic region of the world, the birthplace of Islam there are many picutres that do depict the prophet, with the face covered by a vail. These early documents are just part of the large contradiction that is Islam. But that's not why I mention this.

Other than attempting to rationalize away the Truth by saying there is no truth, people get away from it by deny access to any other points of view. Islam is probably one of the most extreme forms of this attempt to hide the Truth. I believe that often times, when something is either just off the Truth, or is just some truth covered lies, the method of avoiding the Truth is to cut off those who follow it from any chance to question or hear other points of view from their own. It's just too dangerous because if a lie does that, or something that's just missing one or two key elements of the Truth does that, it knows that it will be exposed as anything but the Truth, and will therefore loose its adherents.

I've also found that liberals do the same thing - they call anyone that disagrees with them intolerant, but mostly Christians (and that includes nominal christians and real christians). When the strange thing is most real Christians are more tolerant than liberals. This is how this is true - Christians will let you believe what you want, but we'll say that we think you're wrong, and this is why you shouldn't believe it. Many Liberals will just say "How dare you think differently than me? Don't you know I know better than you?" The hypocrisy is just stunning (not that Christians can't be hypocrites too, it's just that a lot of the time, we'll admit it.)

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts about Truth. I hope you could follow along, I do try to make it readable.

"Then you shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free. "
"So if the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed."
John 8:32, 36

Blessings...