We Do Not Construct It or Reconstruct It.

In 1887, college professor Henry Drummond said regarding absolute truth, “Truth is not to be found in what I have been taught. That is not truth. …Therefore, let us dismiss from our minds that predisposition to regard that which we have been brought up in as being necessarily the truth. …If that were the definition of truth, truth would be just what one’s parents were—it would be a thing of hereditary transmission, and not a thing absolute in itself.”

Truth is a thing in itself. We do not construct it or reconstruct it.

In 1992, the Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy said in a ruling, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

This concept of liberty is the opposite of absolutism, and it's the very thing that is turning societies into aimless masses of less-liberated individuals; seized and contained by our individual purposelessness, rather than strong individuals amalgamated together with a clear purpose and direction as a whole. If we truly believe we can redefine our reality based on what we want our reality to be, our reality loses all meaning. If truth is everything, it is nothing. Our reality becomes less and less real, the more we attempt to assign our own conception of reality, rather than seek and accept the truth that already is.

“Truth is no longer seen as objective and is no longer limited to its rational dimension. Now, truth is viewed as subjective and one is free to tap into emotions and intuition to find it. …Today, propositional truth has taken a backseat to personal truth. Propositional truth asserts that our truth claims can be stated and analyzed into logic, otherwise they are false. …The answer to conflicting truth claims is not to rebuff the idea of absolutes, but to instead find out what those absolutes are.” Todd Ahrend

Truth is not reducible to what my concept of existence is, thank goodness. Truth cannot be adjusted to what I mean it to be, thank goodness. The thing about truth is that if we try to conform it to our will, we don’t actually change it. Truth, by definition, remains absolute even when we attempt to call it anything but. Because truth is absolute, and we can’t actually conform it to our will, things begin to fall apart when we try to squeeze it into the space we want it to fit, or try to redefine it. We do not change truth or fit truth into that small space of our perception and concepts of existence; we squeeze ourselves into smaller and smaller spaces; we lose our intellectual grip on reality; we become meaningless the more we intend to create our own meaning.

“The result of an understanding of truth void of absolutes is that it leaves no comprehensive categories of experience or knowledge. Because it rejects the idea of a singular grand story—a metanarrative—that explains what is true and gives meaning to all life, there is no overarching purpose wherein one’s own experience can fit and find meaning. Instead, one’s own experience is the only absolute. …One of the tragedies of the 21st century is that this very popular belief system leaves little to live for. Ravi Zacharias states: ‘There is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no metanarrative to life, no overarching story by which all the particulars can be interpreted… Life needs a story to understand the details. Life needs to hold tighter at the center if we are to reach to distant horizons. But our culture neither owns a story nor holds at the center.’” Todd Ahrend