A man can teach himself how to love anything he can see with his eyes, touch with his hand hear with his ears smell with his nosie taste with his mouth feel in his heart and think in his mind of imaginations but only God can teach a man how to Love God.

"If it's the Truth, it will stand."

Stand to what? If you mean that it will stand the tests of time, I invite you to consider the various contradicting lines of thought regarding just about every significant philosophical issue which have existed for the past 2,000 years. Many have endured and flourished.

And why is God the only one capable of teaching love? Must love be taught?

Didymos Thomas
sorry I did not reply sooner

To a lie, do not men live by lies as if they where true? Do not men tell lies to gainsay from others? Do not men us world power and authority for there own gain and fulfill of their imaginations of desire, at the expense of others?
Do not men lie to themselves to justify there wrath, and want, thinking that they are, or have righteousness. Then believing they have the right to judge others, for they do not have the same righteousness as they? Is this not self righteousness? How can that which is made of dirt be righteous? Within this, do not men create reasons in his heart to do so?

Reasons are real to you when you can feel them. And why do you feel them? That which you love and loved. To have a love/hate relationship with one's own feelings can and will deceive you. (Ask any one who is in jail for the crime of passion that justified their anger)

For the Love of God will not fail you, or the ones you give of His Love given you; but one's own love will fail you and others.

No offense, as this is probably the result of me being slow this afternoon, but your reply does not seem to answer my first question - Stand to what?

As for God's love, and the source of love, I can appreciate that you claim our own love will fail, and that God's will not, but here again I have some issues. First, being that to even say 'God loves' is to apply a human quality to God, who is nonhuman. Second, though man is certainly fallible, he is not necessarily always wrong; though he can fail, he does not always fail.

Hi all!!

There is something about the staying power of truth, take the orgin of species published close to one hundred and fifty years ago. Though the majority of Christian America wished to reject it, and has attacked it for the past one hundred and fifty years. It only gains in crediability with the passage of time and the many assaults upon its crediability. It is at present considered more than a theory, that is a quotation from the Pope. It has today gained the satus of fact by 99.98 percent of the scientific community. Takes a licken and keeps on ticken you might say, truth just keeps on coming at you, stronger each unfolding day.

Darwin has lasted over one hundred years - the notion that the Earth was flat lasted for thousands.

Thomas Darwin,

For thousands of years there was little in the way of a contention to another reality. Still, flat as things appeared, with an increase in knowledge the truth of that knowledge won out. Our knowledge today is geometrically increasing, hold on to your dogmas gentlemen!

"The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees. ... But life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth. (Arthur Schopenhauer, 1818)

One cannot argue that hearing the truth has a powerful impact upon those with an honest intellect (not necessarily a great one, but an honest one). The problem is that, unless honest men learn and teach the truth, the truth can be ignored and persecuted. A dishonest man with a sharp tongue can do much to destroy the truth in the eyes of the ill-informed masses.

Didymos Thomas
Nicely said; agree, agree, agree

"One cannot argue that hearing the truth has a powerful impact upon those with an honest intellect (not necessarily a great one, but an honest one). The problem is that, unless honest men learn and teach the truth, the truth can be ignored and persecuted. A dishonest man with a sharp tongue can do much to destroy the truth in the eyes of the ill-informed masses."
********

After reading these postings, I am not sure then on "stands to what?" As you would see it.
why the question?

Didymos Thomas,

Truth will always be persecuted, that seems to be the price payed for eventually being embraced. That is something else I find an unfortunate characteristic of the Christian church and thus most of its followers, the resistence to new knowledge. It has been said that the conflict between science and the church is not really as it might appear, it is in fact a conflict between the science of two thousand years ago with the science of the present. Think about it, the bible, the church has not embrace any new knowledge in two thousand years. Once the truth has been adequately express, it does have the tendency of returning renewed more powerful and introduced into a new societal context.

"All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as selfevident." Schopenhauer

And then finally, finally it is proved wrong. Truth is a form of human relationship, and no form lasts forever, while too many last long enough to become straight jackets for the mind.

How far are you willing to take that?

Just to the door. If there were only one door in the entire cosmos a dog would be on the wrong side of it.

That is probably a truism, isn't it. Truth is not a thing, but a value, or a meaning. There is no eternal truth. There is stuff that is true, and that is a fair representation of reality. It has to work right? Your tell me truly that your nut fits my bolt, well then it better fit. In the process of deciding what is true, we are not killing each other, we are discussing values, we are getting to know each other, maybe having a beer, and sharing pictures of the kids and wives; and generally forming a relationship around that one idea. But you can't take crap seriously because that gets people killed. So, What's the truth? Lets flip on it.

Okay, but how far do you go in the application? Is nothing true, therefore evry claim is false? Is nothing necessarily true, and if so, when would some claim be true and when would it not be true? Or do you really want to flip on it - any claim is just as likely to be true as it is false?

You remind me of the story of the man who wanted to know what life was. So, he quit his job, and left his family, and crossed the ocean, the desert, the steaming jungle, and climbed the highest mountain to find the wisest man in the world to find what was life. And when he located this wise man he said: Can you tell me what is life? And the old man said: Yes! Life is a garden! The traveller nodded his head for amoment thinking of this, and then began to grow angry. I left my job, my family, crossed the ocean, and desert, and jungle, and climbed this damned mountain to have you tell me life is a garden? The old man said: So, it's not a garden.

What ever life is, it is is not worth fighting over. All these ideas are only as good as they improve our lives. Truth is not an absolute, but a relative value. Impossible is never impossible. We do the impossible every day. Impossible is a relative value. We use concepts and forms as forms of relationship. Every time a dispute over a form results in a death it has been defeated in its purpose, the purpose that was given to it by the humanity that found it, and found meaning in it. We want meaning in our lives. We want lives of meaning, but life is essential to meaning as well as meaning is essential to life. The truth is only as true as it is good. Before I can agree with you on truth you must tell me its implications, and until I know that, all I know is I don't know.

Beliefs about the truth may come and go. But the truth abides forever. If the theory of Evolution is true, well, it is true, whether or not people continue to believe it is true. And, if the flat-Earth theory is false, well, it is false, whatever anyone believes.

Fido - I didn't ask about life. I asked how far you take your statements; from your response, I take it you find my questions to be of little value.



How relative is 1+1=2? What is it relative to? For something to be relative, it must be relative to something. If truth is relative, and the truth of 1+1=2 is relative, what is this logical truth relative to?



Then impossible has no meaning. The obvious bit is that impossible does have meaning, and there are impossible things. If nothing is impossible, physically leave physical reality. Obviously, this is impossible. Do we do impossible things everyday? Such as. Tell me something that man is not capable of doing, that man does.

To express any given truth, we have to use relationship - relationships of concepts and ideas. If we have mutual understanding of those relationships, of those concepts and ideas, then we can produce true statements which can be understood and agreed upon.
Even if we do not agree on those relationships, those concepts and ideas, our lack of agreemtn has no influence upon the truth. If I say a frog is green, and you are ignorant of frogs and the colors green, the frog still may very well be green and a frog despite your ignorance.

Kennethamy
if I may say in agreement:

The Truth is the Truth no matter what the Truth is.
Whether all mankind is aware of it, or not. It is still the Truth.