Not true or false, but more than half true, more than half false.
I propose that the truest speaker at best speaks only fractional truth, that the most abased liar is not 100% wrong. Emphatically I add that the assumption that humans can judge the truth of much, or even will ever be able to judge the truth of much, has enormous problems of verification.
I was raised a Christian, repeating that for the Nth time. I was told that the church introduced us to the Bible, guided us on how to read it, how to understand, how to be saved, told us that the Bible was true, that God was truth, that as Christians we were allied with the truth. Fill a kid with enough abstractions, the kid'll swallow almost anything as true: For God so loved the world, parallel lines never meet. Was your childhood much different? These days it's our secular indoctrination that marks us the most: we're Americans, we're free, we're educating ourselves ... like nuts and bolts on an assembly line. The propaganda of the school board is the truth.
So. I'm not the first Christian, or the first American, to believe, while In the clutches of the propagandists, that I am associated with the truth. Associate a kid with something and the kid will confuse himself with that something. Jesus said "I am the truth," clearly Jesus had been a kid who had been to school.
It's not entirely my invention that I identify not only with God and the Bible and with Jesus but with the Truth: always have, can't stop me.
So how come I'm not just like you? How come you're so very different from me? Have you spent your life writing about God? Not getting published? Finally publishing yourself? getting shunned? getting beat up>? getting arrested? censored?
When I got beat up my lawyer said, "You invented the internet!" True, but that's not the subject here.
When I got arrested and jailed my lawyer (public defender, the shunned can't hire lawyers), said, "You're a truth teller!" Exactly. (Bravo!) (Both lawyers struck me as smart in those moments (both behaved like morons once addressing the court)!) (Does the court assume that the corpses it failed to defend from lynching in life were truth tellers? all those Christians? all those niggers? all those anarchists?)
As a kid, repeating what the church told me, I was a truth teller. We were all truth tellers. As a student at Columbia I was a truth teller among truth tellers. The University didn't just own race tracks and slums in South America, we were truth tellers (that's why the fed gave us a cyclotron!)
Today, your and your kids sit in front of the TV, read the paper, read the right best sellers: truth tellers all.
Except for my last couple of questions:
These days what tickles truth teller pk, fractionally, all fractions, is the idea of humans, Original Sinners, kleptocrats, robots for compulsory schooling, cannibals of Christ, deluding themselves that humans can know or tell the truth! Newton, Darwin, Einstein ... the Bible. Is any of it 100% true? You mean there's no difference between the map and the territory? You mean the symbol is the thing?!
Semiotics. We're talking, we're thinking: we're using symbols, our bodies, our brains are processing signals: the matter composing us may be symbols, signals being processed ...
Theo-cosmological morons pretending we're real.
Gregory Bateson showed us that the truth could be reversed, evoking less error if we inverted science and talked about error receding more than truth advancing. What Newton said wasn't truth; it was less false than anything preceding it had ever been. What Einstein said wasn't true, it was less false than what Newton had said.
If we can avoid being 100% false, we've really accomplished something. I believe I have; but remember: I used to believe I was Christian!
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