“Truth” as a Synonym for Christianity
There is a difference between knowing and believing. Fundamentalist Christians often think that if they believe something is true, that makes it true. They might even claim that it is “true for them.” More often than not, they will even say that their view of their religion is Truth.
I want to point out that these fundamentalists don’t say that their religion is true, but rather that their particular interpretation of their religion is Truth. They are not making a claim about how accurately their religion matches up with reality, but rather that their religion is reality itself.
This is cult-speak. It is a way to circumvent the reasoning process so that the fundamentalist need not even evaluate whether the claims actually match up with the real world. If the claims are present as a reality in and of themselves, then we don’t have to observe how accurate they are or in this case aren’t.
When someone makes a claim like “the door is open,” we have to observe the door in question and see whether or not the claim fits with our observation. If the claim does match our observations, then we can say that the claim is true. We would not say that the claim is Truth.
Christianity in general and fundamentalist Christianity in particular make claims about reality but instead of observing the world to see if those claims are accurate, they simply declare the claims as Truth. When asked to present evidence to support the “Truth” claim, Christians have a pocket full of failed arguments which typically play on people’s emotions, ignorance, and lack of critical thinking rather than on actual evidence.
It is one thing to say that you believe a certain thing to be the case, but are not certain that it actually is the case and another thing to claim that your beliefs are “Truth” without the need to justify that “Truth” with actually facts, observations, and evidence.
