You Can't Handle the Truth! So Why Bother?

So I was doing some reflecting the other day about some of the evangelistic conversations that I have been apart of and the more I thought about it the more I saw a common pattern. When I spoke with people about Christianity most people either said that I was “narrow-minded” to say that Christianity was the only true religion or they said that all religions are equally true. So what I would like to do is make the case that truth is absolute.

If you do not know what absolute truth or relativism is let me clue you in. Relativism is the idea that some elements or aspects of experience or culture are relative to, i.e., dependent on, other elements or aspects. Relativists say things like, “That’s true for you, but not for me.” or “You can't judge other cultures by the standards of your own.". Now absolute truth is whatever is always valid, regardless of parameters or context. Meaning that truth is absolute it does not change and whatever that truth claims anything that opposes or contradicts that is wrong.

Now there are several problems with the relativists view. The first problem is the idea of noncontradiction. Something cannot “be and not be” at the same time. For example I cannot, be wearing a red shirt and not be wearing a red shirt at the same time it is impossible. When it comes to saying that all truth claims are equal you have a problem. You may say “What you believe is true and what I believe is true.” and I will respond by saying “Well I believe you are wrong.” (Hope you see the problem here). Next we see that relativism is not practical. What I mean is that if it is all up to me to decide what is true, then my professor needs to regrade my last math test because I believe I got all of the answers right. It doesn’t matter what he thinks because I believe that every answer I marked on the test was right. Not only is it not practical, but we almost always are trying to make people conform to some standard. You may not have a problem with me believing in Christianity, but you might have problem with me sacrificing babies to the god of Yemiii (I just made that up). The police might have a problem with that as well. So relativism is not practical. Finally, relativism contradicts itself. By saying “That there is no absolute truth and that all truths are equal.” you have just made an absolute statement. You believe that all truths are valid therefore everything should conform to that standard.

Now you maybe wondering why does this matter to me. Well it is a big deal because there are many big truth claims out there (Many claiming where you could spend eternity). You see all of society operates on absolutes the government, schools, businesses, and even military. We all have laws and standards that must be abided by. So why is religion any different? Why do we treat faith views as a different commodity? They have some of the biggest and audacious claims out there and if anything should be carefully looked at it should be those different faith claims out there. This is why we search for truth, because we need to be certain about life and death and everything in between because we do not want to waste our lives on nothing.