- God is the one and only Truth. (10/28/12)
- Jesus said "I am the way and the truth and the life. " If we truly loved Jesus than we would love the truth and follow the truth wherever it lead us, even if it leads us away from our preconceived ideas of what is true. (5/14/13)
- The truth is like beauty. You'll know it when you see it. (6/22/12)
- True statements are not the Truth but only point to the Truth.
- True statements tell us about the nature of reality. False statements tell us about the nature of their proclaimer. (5/21/13)
- The truth is what is. (2/21/12)
- "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it."- H.G. Wells (7/20/11)
- This comes from handling truth with the imagination rather than with the inteelect. (1/121/12)
- The truth is not something you can discover through an democratic election. (7/22/11)
- "It takes a very long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth." -Alice Koller (7/28/11)
- Truth draws strength from itself and not from the amount of consent it arouses. - Pope Benedict XVI( 7/25/11)
- "The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel." - H.L. Mencken (9/15/11)
- The truth should never cause anger. If it does than tou have been living a lie. -Tamatin Arasi (1/21/12)
- The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.”-Gloria Steinem (1/21/12)
- This says more about the nature of Gloria Steinem than it does about the nature of truth (1/21/12)
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Saturday, November 27, 2010
Truth
Friday, November 12, 2010
Good and Evil
Good and evil are obvisouly opposites. Things can be oposits in at least two ways. One way is for the opisites to be two distinct thins with opisite charectistics. Examples are the north and south magnitic poles. Male and female and positive and negative charge. In each of these the examples the opsites are distint things that can be described apart from their opisite. Another type of oposites is whwn one of the opisites is simply the absence of the other. Examples of this type include light and dark and hot and cold. In these examples one is the absance of the other. Darkness is the absence of light. Cold is the abance of heat. It can some time be difficult to determine whar type of opsites a pair are and in the case of one being the absence of the other. which one is which. Is light the absence of darkness or is darkness the absence of light?. At one level both statements make sence, but as people learned more and more about light it became clear that light was a form of electromafnetic rediaction with a certian wave length and freciency. There have been books written about light but all you can realy say about darkness is that it is the absence of light. Darkness is not made up of some partical in the way light is made up of photons. As we study a pair of opisites more and more, we may find that we can say much about of one of the pairs but only that the other is the absance the opsite. When this happen it shows that the oposites are not two distinct things but one is a distinct thing and the other is the absence of it.
As we study good and evil more and more we learn that we can say much a bout the various forms of goodness such as love, truth, joy. There have been books written about each. It may seem at first that we can also say much about evil, but a close examination reveals that the much of what is said about evil is not about evil itself but about evil itself but the causes and effects of evil. We may speake about darkness as causing poor viaion or we can tell how to mane a room dark, but this in not about darkness itself but the cuse and effects of darkness. Some people equate pain and suffering with evil. There is much that can be said about pain and suffreing bur I donot beleive that pain and suffering are the same as evil.
If evil is the absence of something than how can it cause anything? Eveil can not create anything but it does cause things atleast in relation to goodness. It is analogious to cold causing the formation of ice. Cold is the absence of kinetic enerhy of molicules (ie heat) but it causes ice to forn
Many diseases are caused by the absence of a nutrient or other factor even cancer eichis the poliveration of cell is caused by the absence of one or more regulators of cell growth. In the same way an evil man does not have someyhing a good man dees not., but an evil man lacks somethong a good man has.
First lets look at pain. The capacity to feel pain is not only not evil but the capacity to feel pain is a good thing. If we had no ability to freel pain than we would not know to remove out hand from a very hot object untill after we were burned. In this since pain is like a smoke detector or warning light on our cars dash board.
There is a difference between pain and suffering. It has been said that pain is inevitable but suffering is optionai. This points to the distinction between the toe suffering is our reaction to pain. I beleive this is because the only thing anyone cans say about evil is that it is the absence of light.
3/10/11: There are two related aspects of evil, not seeing the good and not being the good. Not seeing the good is more like the darkness due blindness than darkness due to the absence of light. It is subjective darkness in an objective world of infinite light, but it is not like the blindness of a person who loses their sight. It is like the blindness of a person who loses their life. Dead people don't see and you can not transplant a living eyeball in a dead body and make it see. Evil is spiritual darkness that results from the spiritual blindness that results from spiritual death that results from the separation of our spirit from the Holy Spirit which is the source of all spiritual life.
Not being the good in a similar way is the result of being cut off from the Holy Spirit which is the source of all good, of all love, joy and peace.
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