WHY NOT?
By Rick Mathes
There are two questions that have nagged me from as far back as I can remember: Why and what is Truth? Apart from Jesus and the constant teaching of the Apostles, neither question can ever be objectively answered. To this day my mind goes haywire when I hear people philosophize in a relative and often circular manner of reasoning. To them, truth is whatever they believe to be true. They cross their eyes when I remind them of the law of non-contradiction: A cannot be both A and B at the same time or A and B cannot both be true.
Socrates drove everyone nuts with his incessant questioning of “Why?” His dialectic method of questioning made fools out of those who lived without constants, nothing objectively secure.
My parents would say, “You need to be in by 10PM!” I’d ask, “Why?” and they would say, “Because we said so!” Made no sense to me the difference between 9PM and 11PM so I would stay out until midnight which made more sense to me.
And my second nagging question was, “What is truth?” I read almost every word in the Great Books Library, had a I Q of 140 and still didn’t know what truth was. I didn’t learn until I read the Bible Jesus say, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
I still can’t understand how Jesus can be the truth. I can understand how he has the truth, or he knows the truth, or he teaches the truth but how can a man be a concept, and why?
There I go again, I’m right back to where I started!
Rick Mathes 