S5 Ep 24 The History of Truth

So we, you know, the world today, those of us, I'm speaking from a Western perspective, that's the world we're

in, and that's the world where Judaism evolved, and that's the world where most people who listen to this podcast are in.

Although the East has been very much affected of late by Western concepts in many, many ways.

But we kind of assume that,

like,

Just as we think history has always been history, recording of facts.

No, it's not true.

In the ancient world, history was not about recording of facts.

It was about using the story to basically make a point.

It

was not about necessarily recording things honestly or accurately.

So it's the same thing with truth.

We think truth is recognition of absolutes, whether they're in physical reality or ideological, moral, economic, you know.

The idea that truth is these measurable, quantifiable, provable, empirical facts that have evidence behind them and therefore they're incontrovertible.

There's either truth or there's a lie.

I think that's a lot of what Western discourse is around when we talk about truth.

Right, and out of that comes edges of good and evil, you know, that there's absolutes.

This is very much, but this is really very much a byproduct of Judeo-Christian thinking, as we'll unpack as we go through it.

The irony is, of course, fast forward thousands of years after all this was in play, and this is, we have to go back literally, you know, thousands of years to talk about this.

We're back to a phase where people are arguing about truth again.

I'm not talking about just political things, like you get in debate about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and people tell me those are your facts, as if there's different kinds of facts.

But that people argue about even truths on a biological level, the debate about what's a woman.

This is kind of stuff that would have Romans scratching their head in disbelief.

But I think it's a good place to kind of go back and maybe do a fast run through like, what's the history of truth in Western thought? So I think to kind of set the stage, we have to understand that throughout human history, people have always been, doesn't matter where they are in the world, religious.

Religion is ubiquitous.