Imperishable Inheritance

I sub­mit­ted the fol­low­ing let­ter to The Guardian for pub­li­ca­tion. Will they pub­lish it? Prob­a­bly not.

As stu­dents, we are immersed in a sub­cul­ture where there is a pre­vail­ing con­sen­sus on the denial of the neces­sity and absolute nature of truth and knowl­edge. I remem­ber dis­tinctly my first phi­los­o­phy class dur­ing a debate on the­ism, and my pro­fes­sor pro­claimed to me, ‘if you want to believe in theism’that’s fine, but it’s not true for me.’

I sud­denly became entranced with this attrac­tive idea that I was no longer respon­si­ble to look for, find, and under­stand objec­tive, absolute truths. I proudly pro­claimed my rel­a­tivis­tic view­point in polit­i­cal, the­o­log­i­cal, and philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions; but after a while I real­ized that I had learned noth­ing at all. I was not grow­ing intel­lec­tu­ally or per­son­ally, and it was made clear when I was shown that by declar­ing that there is not absolute truth I was mak­ing an absolute state­ment about the truth!

But the rel­a­tivist pro­claims that his flawed ide­ol­ogy is the only absolute truth, and also logic has no bear­ing on rel­a­tivism there­fore it can not make log­i­cal fal­lac­ies. Was my cyn­i­cism clear enough? The rel­a­tivist also declares that our cog­ni­tive bias (senses) can­not derive any mean­ing­ful truth; it only slants our per­spec­tive of the truth. In other words, it doesn’t even mat­ter if there were absolutes truths’we couldn’t find them any­way! So you might as well pack up and go back home’there’s noth­ing to find here (or any­where for that matter).

Now, I ven­ture not in this short arti­cle to dis­cuss the per­me­at­ing effects of post­mod­ern phi­los­o­phy, or the vari­a­tions between cul­tural, moral, lin­guis­tic and other forms of rel­a­tivism. I only want to expose this dan­ger­ous and unful­fill­ing intel­lec­tual ‘dis­ease’ before some­one else wastes life with it as I did.

I am, although, com­forted in my assur­ance that The Truth is indeed com­ing back. I know He will set every­thing straight.

Chris Poteet