What is Truth?

So in my Christian club at school I spoke a little about truth. The first question that has to be answered is obviously "what is truth"? The best answer I could find was that truth is in accordance with fact or reality. I then wondered what makes something true? Truth has a lot of criteria to it and is quite complicated. For something to be true, it has to correspond to fact and to reality, as I said before. Another idea is that truth is what we all agree it is. For example, we all know what the color white looks like. Even if the color looks different to all of us, we all agree that the color is white. This isn't a very satisfactory for truth though, because sometimes we don't all agree on something. For example, sometimes one person will say a color is blue when another person will say it is green. So what is the truth? No one really knows. We could go with the majority, but that goes against the idea of what truth is. Truth has to be indisputable. Certain truths can be created by people, which may sound like it goes against the idea of truth. In math, two plus three equals five. Numbers and math are not in nature, but were created to describe what we observe. The concept of numbers is man made, but still is logical and holds truth to it. By what we define as "three" and "two", and "addition", the sum of three and two is indeed five. That is a truth, even though we made it up. Not everything we make is truth however. People created religions, which all cannot be true. Multiple ideas of a same concept cannot all be true at the same time. You cannot say you were at multiple places at one time. Either you were at one of those places or you lied and you were at none of the places you said. The point is that either one religion is right, or evolution, or none of these is the truth. Now think of the law of gravity. Gravity says that everything goes down (on earth anyway). If I have a pencil and I hold it up and I drop it, it will fall. This will happen even if I do it everyday, hour, minute, or second. What am I getting at here? The truth cannot fail. It cannot be disproved. Gravity is true because we have not been able to disprove it, and so far it has not failed. Therefore the law of gravity is a truth. What makes something true is that it corresponds to fact and reality, and it never fails.
-Smart  

Arguments

I started thinking about arguments recently. Arguments are debates between people when both sides differ on what they think or believe. During arguments, people try to come up with reasons to persuade other people that they are right. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. When people want someone to see their point of view, it's okay to argue a bit. For example, if I believe global warming is an issue, I can argue that global warming is real and we should do more to prevent it. Arguments that are used to inform people of important issues are fine. What I have a problem with is when pointless subjects are argued over. A huge issue that is always debated is religion. I see it all the time. People argue religion vs. science or religion vs. religion and it's so pointless. Both sides are wasting their time and energy to get absolutely nothing done. Think about it for a second- how often do people actually change their mind about religion? Every time I see an argument like this it bothers me because there really is no point to arguing something that no one is going to act on. Arguments are made to persuade other people of something, but if you can't persuade anyone why argue? There is no purpose to arguing if you cannot persuade or convince someone. I may sound quite harsh, but don't get me wrong. I am not saying you shouldn't believe in something. Of course you should. Having a belief or opinion on something is not wrong at all. Trying to argue with other people that you are right is not helpful. So does this mean we should never talk about touchy subjects like religion? I don't think it has to be. I talk about religion with people and it's fine. What's the difference? I don't argue with people. We simply discuss. Before you talk about something like religion, it is important that both you and the person you are talking to understand that you aren't trying to change any beliefs. With that in mind it is so much easier to have a conversation. Topics that are often argued are usually quite interesting to me- but not when they are argued over. I don't understand why people can't just accept that other people believe in something other than you do and it's not that much of an issue. I think we need to stop trying to argue over pointless subjects and let people believe what they believe. Arguing is useless (most of the time).
-Smart  

Morals

Morals are very interesting to think about. Morals are the principles we follow or at least want to follow. Morals are what guide people and are almost rules that they follow. I don't want to discuss in detail what morals are, or what moral code is right. I don't even want to suggest what morals you should follow. I want to talk a bit about morals and where they come from. Although morals are similar to rules, they aren't precisely the same thing. Rules are set by people for others to follow, morals are principles that people set for themselves. Many people would agree that it is good for someone to have a good moral standard, which is not the same as saying it is good for someone to follow rules. A person that has a high moral standard decides to mostly on their own, while a person that follows rules only does it because other people set it for them. This brings me to a question; where do morals come from? I think everyone would agree at least to some extent that everyone has morals. Where do these morals come from? I first thought about outside influences. It's logical to say that people get morals from other people who have morals. That makes sense. For example, a child may believe that it is wrong to steal because his parents told them stealing is wrong. Many people believe that stealing is wrong. Do we all believe this because someone else told us it was wrong to steal? Can people really influence us this much? I don't believe so. When we hear on the news that someone has been murdered, we are astonished. Does this come simply from the fact that others told us that this is bad? I heard a story from a lady who was hit by a drunk driver while in her car. The lady not only was injured, she was pregnant at the time. The audience with me gasped. Obviously the people there knew that this was a terrible event. Where does that sense of morality come from? I do not believe it comes simply from other peoples' influences. I think we inherently have morals. I believe we all have morals regardless of who we are or where we are. So where does this come from? Does it come with being human? Well perhaps. This explanation is not very satisfactory however. I believe that morals are one of the things that just can't really be explained looking just at people, similarly to how we can't explain why people love entertainment. I think we have to look at something greater than us to discover where morals come from. In C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity (a book I recommend), he says that the main reason he became Christian is because he believe our moral standard had to come from somewhere. I agree with him that our sense of morality cannot be explained except by something greater than ourselves.
-Smart

   

Appreciation

Today I want to talk about appreciation. In the last post I talked about complaining and what we can do about it. I mentioned appreciating the things we have in our life, and I want to expand on that. Appreciating things we have seems to be difficult for us. Why is this? Usually we just don't think about the things we have. We have an expectation that the things we have will be there. We get used to the things we own and we forget about them. A way to avoid this mindset is to remind yourself of the stuff you have. This sounds really obvious, but people don't do it. People don't appreciate things because they think what they have is not enough. People always want more and more stuff. I think this is driven by a similar desire that we have for entertainment (see post on entertainment). We always crave the newest technology, clothes, car, or whatever. We seem to never have enough. So what can we do about this? Again, we have to look back at the things we have, and just appreciate them. Remind yourself that not everyone in the world has the things you have. We also have to accept that no matter what we have we will never have enough. We will always have a desire for more and more things but we will never truly be satisfied. This is a hard concept to grasp, but once we accept that getting new things won't satisfy us we can live a little easier. Appreciating things doesn't only go for material things though. We also have trouble appreciating ourselves or others. We always get jealous of other people and what they can do or how tall they are or how good-looking they are. When we keep looking at what other people have we forget what we have and only focus on what we don't have. Comparisons make us feel insecure, jealous, and unappreciative. We need to stop comparing ourselves to other people and learn to appreciate ourselves. I'm reminded of a story of a man. This man lived a fairly normal life, but then somehow became blind. He began to complain about the things he could no longer do to his friend. He could no longer watch TV, play sports, read, text, or do many things a normal person could. When his friend saw he was feeling depressed, he told the man to make a list of the things he could still do. The man had a huge list, with things like eat, listen to music, and lots more. He began feeling a lot better about his life and was able to cope with his situation better. What's the point? It's pretty obvious. Once we begin to appreciate the things we have and the things we can do, our attitude on life changes. We begin to feel better about ourselves and are able to see the positive side of life rather than the negative (see post on optimism). Learn to appreciate what you have.  
-Smart