John 18:37-38

"Pilate therefore said to Him, “Are You a king then?”
Jesus answered, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”

"Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews, and said to them, “I find no fault in Him at all."


Pilate is usually criticized for this question, but I think he makes an excellent point. What IS truth?

We act as if we know, but I am not so sure we do.

What does it mean that someone is a true friend? That an arrow is true?

Obviously it doesn't mean that these correspond accurately to some underlying reality. Rather, the idea of Truth seems more to reflect some manner of reliability. The friend is true when they remain a friend come thick or thin; the arrow is true when it hits its mark. When Jesus said that he is the Truth, did he simply mean that he points the Way to Life?

As you probably remember I have much to criticize about the churches. They have all failed in one way or another. Still, I compare the nations that have had the Christian faith deeply embedded in their history to the nations that have not, and especially to those nations that have only had some very primitive form of religion ... and there's a clear difference.

I also look at the ideologies that have promoted atheism ... and some have done well, but especially those that hated - not the failures of the churches but Jesus himself - have been downright awful. There have been many decent atheists, but the best have been at least friendly to Jesus even if they did not believe him to be literally God.

Then we must consider not the great men of history, but the average men and women of history. Great men may converge with Jesus based on first principles and so may not really need him per se, but ordinary men and women - if they discard Jesus they are likely to discard many good and necessary things as well. Whereas it seems that most humans need SOME sort of central, unifying ideology, what will the average person REPLACE Jesus with?

Whatever else we may say about the Christian faith, it has had two thousand years to be refined - to discard the most harmful dogmas while usually retaining those that worked best.

Maybe what we need is not so much a rejection of the church, but for the church to live up to the principles it professes. Certainly if Christians actually paid attention to what Jesus said they could not in good conscience call for crimes to be committed against as is so often the case in our society misguided by Rousseau's REJECTION of Christianity - which is where they get their nonsensical ideas of "childhood innocence".