Which truth?

Brazza: Reading through a book by another author, I came across this excellent advice:

"We cannot know the truth. At best, we can believe in it. Those that truly seek the truth cannot and should not apply it in light of their own religion. If you do so, will it not compromise your own integrity? What is life's purpose? To believe in the truth, or seek it?"

Erich von Däniken (1935– )
Swiss author

smoke4ever: The truth is that God loves us.
And His name is Jesus Christ.

antonello: The truth is that we will never know the real truth and that everybody claiming the opposite is either dishonest or a delusional dreamer.

Give me one good reason that is not a circular argument or religiously motivated why I should believe a theist when he claims to know the absolute truth on behalf of the entire mankind once and for all.

CoIin: God exists and he loves you
The Bible tells us so
And the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God

antonello: Hey, doesn't that qualify as a circular argument?

CoIin: Dang! Back to square one then

holygrail: What it boils down to, is that every time I hear someone claim that "the truth is [insert whatever], I become extremely skeptical, because I know for a fact that it cannot be the truth, just a personal opinion. I want to feel free to develop my own truth, completely independent of any religious influence. While there may be a kernel of truth in most religions, it has been wrapped in so many layers of myths and legends that it has lost its original meaning and significance a long time ago. That's why such religious truths need to be re-examined from a completely neutral perspective, since everybody can claim just about anything and call it truth. So we thus have objective truths and subjective truths. Personally, I don't trust the latter at all, particularly when religion is involved.

smoke4ever: God tells the truth.
The Devil twists and perverts the truth.
Prove me wrong

holygrail: You never give up, do you, Smoke?

How about this: Everybody twists and perverts the truth? Because nobody will ever know the complete truth, so no matter how we try to formulate it, it comes out the way we want to believe it. That's why my truth is different from yours and everybody else's.

And once again: Proof is pointless when one debates religion, because nothing can be proven one way or the other. So there is no proof, only indications that are colored by a person's conviction. Nobody will ever be able to prove or disprove the existence of God or the Devil. You have to believe in them for them to become a reality.

PS So when you call something "truth", it is your subjective version of it and not my truth, because you cannot define any universal truth based on your faith. If you do, you are very arrogant and belittling the rest of us; thereby implicating that our truth is less worth than yours.

smoke4ever: what is "your truth?"

CoIin: If Truth is absolute, why are there so many versions of it? Every religion and its has one.

purple sweet: God is love that is truth

satangel: The "truth" in the Bible isn't what you should think. It was the custom of its authors to use ordinary terms in a way that suited their own purposes. Regarding the word émet (truth) in Hebrew, it meant their own special doctrines, not truth in general. This word appears very many times in this sense and never in an ordinary sense. This fact must be taken into account in dealing with important biblical passages.

satangel: About religious truth in general: You will never be able to discover a complete truth beyond the one corresponding to your wishful thinking before you start to apply a fairly critical thinking to your faith, to find out what really could or couldn't be the truth. Just accepting an unsubstantiated claim as the truth doesn't make it the real truth, no matter if it is written in a scripture and has been repeated billions of times.

The only honest way to search for the truth is to strip off all your clothes (such as religious baggage) and start from scratch naked and humble with an open and critical mind. Within religions, you will only find a kind of truth that is heavily indoctrinated by one particular faith and therefore cannot function outside its intended connection.

Brazza: Here is another word of wisdom from von Däniken:

"It is no longer possible to block the way back to the past with dogmas. If we want to embark on an arduous search for the truth, we must gather the courage to leave the paths that we have hitherto thought along; and the first step is to doubt everything that we have hitherto accepted as correct and true. Is it right to close your eyes and ears for new ideas just because someone calls them heretical and absurd? The idea of landing on the Moon was regarded as absurd fifty years before it really happened."

Bodmin: No religion is true just because its adherents say so!

Come on, folks, what kind of logic would that have been?

For everybody to accept that a religion contains nothing but the truth, it is neceassary to produce real, solid, hard evidence that can be recognised as such by eberybody, not only by its own members. And this is where everything comes to a grinding halt, because so far, nobody has been able to come up with something so tangible that it cannot be challenged.

So there we are, ladies and gentlemen. My conclusion is that each faith creates each own version of what it believes to be the truth, which feels real to its believers, but comes across as false to all others. In other words, there will never exist a religious truth that is universally edible.

holygrail: Smoke, you asked me about my truth.

To define a personal truth is very difficult, because it changes over time, as you grow older and draw different conclusions while you learn new things. What was true to you in childhood seems like oversimplified kid stuff today. As a 4-year-old, Santa Claus was very true, while I as an adult know beyond the shred of doubt that he is make-believe. A person's conception of the truth should thus develop over time. This is only a healthy sign that we learn important lessons from life and pay attention to them. I have no religious truths, because I don't accept any of them. In religious teaching, there might, however, be bits and pieces of historical truths and cultural truths, which unfortunately are intertwined with mythical and supernatural elements into a concept that the followers of that particular faith believe to be the one and only truth, while everybody else perceives it as incomplete or even false.

This is as far as I am able to present a definition of my own personal truth. If you need me to be more precise, I will make one more attempt, OK?

baseball: Truth is such a vague and subjective expression that it can never be universal, absolute and all-compassing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

smoke4ever: i wouldn't take anything that Satangel says about the bible serious.
His or her name gives them away

smoke4ever: @holygrail, i'm not talkin about santa claus and what u thought when u were a kid. I'm talkn about now.
What is the truth to you now?

CoIin: ^^^ "What is the truth to you NOW?"

Ah, an admission of relativism?

satangel: I guess that it's time to introduce myself to new Wireclub members again…

I am a theologian, religion critic, amateur archaeologist and former priest. When I started to doubt the Church's doctrines, my superiors accused me of being possessed by Satan, although they had described me as almost angelic and predicted me a great future in high positions when I still paid allegiance to them. This is the reason for my choice of username.

My posts are therefore influenced by the fact that I both know Christianity from all angles and many other subject areas as well. This gives my analyses inputs from a wide range of disciplines. At least I have the academical depth and credentials in many fields to support my cases, unlike certain others, who seem to be parrots and only repeat Christian dogmas from a literal viewpoint without any real perspective and neutral credibility attached to their statements. But I guess that this is not important to such people, who couldn't care less if what they claim has any roots in reality, given what we know about the cultural environment where Christianity originated and developed. To them, the message is more important than historical authenticity and cohesion.

smoke4ever: lol @ megapineapple

smoke4ever: @satangel
what do u think is the truth?

CoIin: Why this obsession with truth? I think Truth (note capital T) died with postmodernism.

Erasmus described the western philosophical quest for Truth as "comedy of the higher lunacy".