What is Truth - Live Better, Forever

Let's start the New Year with something very simple: The nature of truth. It's not like religionists and philosophers haven't argued about this forever. (Shouldn't take long!) As I grew up, everyone was happy to tell me what 'the truth' was. There was a Santa Claus. I should come Snipe hunting. My church was "true". My country was objectively the best. There were concepts given to me from my family, society, religion, all touted as "true". There were books and lessons to underscore "the truth". And I was encouraged to believe these truths. Pledge to them. Claim them as my own. Testify about them. Own them. Identify with them, as if they were me. And, sometimes, to discover the truth by proclaiming I knew what I didn't (yes, really). Inevitably, these teachings were conceptual, and very rarely experiential. And that was good! "An oven is hot and will burn you." "Here, let me hold your hand against it so you will have direct experience." "Running into traffic can end your life". Etc. I didn't want that. So I had to believe much of what I was told.  But, the more abstract the truth do you find out a country is "best" or "most free" or "most happy"? How do you compare an infinite number of religions? How do you visit the North Pole to disprove, finally and without a doubt, the existence of Santa? (Unless he magically appears just at Christmas). How do we find the truth, if anyone can tell us anything and claim it is true? Are claims and concepts the the best path to truth? And what is truth, anyway? The study of truth is called "Alethiology". I bet you have never heard that word before, which may tell us something about truth and our relation to it in our society. But, that's kind of a trick statement, because "epistemology" is more common and is the study of knowledge. Though you may have never heard that one, either. When I search YouTube for "What is Truth?" a number of videos come out, but *most* of them have a context, and therefore, an agenda. It is Christians talking about truth. Rather than philosophers discussing it in an abstract way. If you have a 'tack' on truth...a lens through which you are looking at it...a context through which you interpret it, can you ever find truth? Optimally, shouldn't you be a completely empty page, an empty cup, ready to explore and understand truth? This is what made Socrates so brilliant. "I know that I know nothing." "Cast aside all assumptions." That is almost impossible as a human. It's an infinite path with an ever-closing-but-never-reaching goal. It surprises me that some people are antithetical to truth. They aren't searching for it. They don't want to know it. They avoid it. And they are uncurious about it. > "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Winston Churchhill (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/05/26/stumble-over-truth/) Why? > "The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable." - James A. Garfield Voltaire says definitions are important. Therefore let us define: "Truth is that which is in accordance with fact or reality." - Dictionary.com via Google. # Why should we be interested in truth? If truth is harmony with fact or reality, why is that important? Obviously, we don't want to be wandering into traffic or stepping off cliffs while we desire to live. Denything the truth of what happens when we are hit by a speeding car or what happens after hitting the ground after a great fall would lead to the cessation of life. So it is that truth, the knowledge of things as they are, is required to protect and enjoy life. Why do we want to protect and enjoy life? Because it's *fun*. [A whole nother topic]. Have you tried being dead? Much less fun. But also, less painful. So there's that. **The idea is that following and prizing truth will end us up at a place of greater abundance of and enjoyment of life.** Our needs as humans will more effectively be met. I think we understand this intuitively. From a child I always wanted to know what *was*. How does this world work? To do so, I learned language, to model, map, and communicate the world. I learned to walk, to better explore the world. Wiki says: >Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of [language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language "Language") or [thought](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought) to a mind-independent world. In other words, if you are able to make language correspond to reality, you have truth. I wanted truth desperately, from a very young age. This is why I had such a crisis when I unmasked Santa. I was trying to figure out and understand the world, and _here the people that I had trusted most were deceiving me the entire time!_ How was I supposed to figure out the truth and reality of the world if there was a massive, worldwide conspiracy of adults to hide the truth from me! Thus my heartbreak. The way in which I discovered truth moving forward was to compare my expereince of life with the results I was promised for the various maps of truth I was given. "Do this --> More enjoyment of life". (More needs will be met?) Did it? If so, continue. If not, do something else. --  [[How do we find truth]]