Truth

As a man, I seek the truth. If you are ill, for example, nothing short of the correct diagnosis, the truth about the cause of your illness, will enable medical science to develop a remedy for your condition. Guessing will not do. Wishing your illness away will similarly do nothing to alleviate your symptoms. Granted, a positive attitude may postpone the inevitable for some time [We’re only beginning to understand the healing powers of our own minds.], but without treatment, without eradicating the growing cancer, you will eventually succumb to your illness. People have been praying for thousands of years, and for thousands of years life expectancy for humans was forty-something. True medical science is only about a hundred years old. Since its birth, right here in the West, humans live twice as long. Have we discovered a truth here? Will you continue to credit your prayers for health and healing that science created? Probably. But know this: you are not being truthful.

Truth is not determined by majority vote. Truth is that which exists in reality. All of your holy books were written millennia-ago by people who thought they lived on a flat plane. None knew even the nature of the planet that gave birth to the human race. Up until about 500 years ago, had there been a poll, 99% would have checked the “flat-Earth” box. The vast majority of Earthlings didn’t know their Earth is a relatively puny globe floating through space, orbiting its sun with clockwork regularity. Had the majority voted and the poll results been published, the vast majority of people would have been comforted by the results. Their wrong-thinking would have been “confirmed” truth. “I must be right! Ninety-nine percent of my neighbors agree.” Did the fact that nearly everybody agreed the Earth is flat alter the reality, change the truth? No. Of course not. The Earth remained, stubbornly, an orb.

The truth is identifiable. It is definable. If the majority fails to see the truth, the truth remains, still, unaltered. The converse is also true: Something that you consider “true” must be identifiable, definable. People of faith through time and across the globe have prided themselves on their willingness to leap into the abyss of the unknowable and declare that they have found the truth. As it turns out, what they declare to be the truth is whatever they want it to be, the laws of nature be damned! If you are hungry, bread falls from the sky. If you want to live forever, believing in this man can deny nature the right to exercise on you every living thing’s inevitable, death. If you sacrifice your life for Allah, and take a number of the infidels with you, you will be rewarded with seventy virgins for some indefinable eternity. If you’re fortunate enough to be born with lots of good karma, you might be lucky enough to be re-born a sacred cow in your next life. All of the examples above have at least one thing in common: none of these beliefs is knowable.

Truth is knowable. It stands firm, unchanging, uncompromising. Man can know truth and falsehood—like good and evil, like black and white. If something seems to be "a gray area" that is only because presently we may lack some knowledge essential to full understanding or we may have erred in our interpretation of the data.

People of faith are actually comforted by the fact that no one can prove their irrational beliefs certifiably false. Their comfort is the result of an integrity deficiency, their absolute refusal to acknowledge: A proof requires data. There can be no data on anyone’s ideas about what happens after we die. Even Carl Sagan threw people of faith a bone when he wrote famously “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Before you break into a “halleluiah” verse, read Sagan’s maxim again. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in a world governed by natural law, i.e. the world Sagan spent his life trying to explain. In the natural world, however far away the subject of our query, however microscopic, however difficult the problem, there is data. As long as the possibility of data exists, there is an existent worthy of our attention, there may be something to learn, and rational men can debate the possibilities. If data exists then proof is possible. There can be no data on anyone’s ideas about what happens after we die. God theories and life-after-death stories offer nothing worthy of our attention, nothing rational men can debate.

[This is why people of faith have been killing each other for centuries... they have nothing to debate, no data with which to persuade honest men. Like the playground bully they have only one tool with which to convert their more thoughtful peers who wish to live: that is, FORCE.]

Our failure presently to solve a problem does not alter the solution. The solution—the truth—is there for us to discover. In other words, whether we know the facts of reality or not, the facts of reality do in fact exist.

Given the fact that humanity faces so many real problems, real threats to our existence—from disease to global warming, from despotic governments to crime to hunger—I think it is immoral that so many of us spend so many hours and so much wealth and brain matter propagating falsehood, dreaming about eternity in paradise. Earth is paradise. Eternity [for a 21st Century American] is about a hundred years with proper diet and exercise.