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The Deepest Truths

Entry 264, on 2005-12-13 at 13:27:34 (Rating 3, Comments)

According to the latest religious commentary in our local paper, the deepest truths are like butterflies, if you try to pin them down you kill them. Doesn't that sound nice, and its so true - or is it? Its important not to take these pretty little similes too seriously and in this case I really just can't accept it is meaningful. What it is suggesting is that we can never really know anything and we shouldn't even try too hard to find the truth because trying to find it moves us further away from it.

In defence of this its tempting to suggest that it is just the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle put into poetic language. After all, the HUP states that the more accurately we try to measure one characteristic, the less accurately we can know another, and we can never know anything exactly.

This is really too generous unfortunately, the so-called "deepest truths" in this case are the details around the Christian nativity myth. The fact that the story of the birth of Jesus doesn't stand up to scrutiny should mean we treat it as an endearing myth, as opposed to anything with historical meaning.

There's been a lot of discussion over the years regarding what the Star of Bethlehem actually was. The simple answer is that it didn't exist. In fact, it is only mentioned in one of the four gospels. How can anyone treat this stuff seriously?

So we shouldn't question this "truth" because if we do, we destroy it. But this happens because it isn't a truth at all, deep or otherwise. Let's just treat religion (Christianity and others) as the interesting but fictitious stories they are, and accept whatever moral messages they contain. But we shouldn't take any one religion or philosophy too seriously and exclude others just because one belief system is traditionally treated as being more important than others.

And the only way to find real truth (in the strict sense, not the religious sense) is through science. This reminds me of the novel 1984. The Ministry of Truth dealt with propaganda (the antithesis of truth). In religion truth is another way of describing something that isn't true, but we like to pretend it is.

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