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Articles

What Is Truth?

Richard Oxenberg on the need for an old paradigm, especially in ethics.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says to Pontius Pilate: “I was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Pilate famously responds, “What is truth?”

This question has reverberated through the ages, not least because, as Pilate’s question suggests, different religions and cultures have presented us with very different versions of what they’ve called the truth. Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Communists, Fascists, and many others, have fought violent battles to promulgate and defend their particular version of ‘the truth’.

The bloody battles over truth in Europe between Protestants and Catholics played a significant role in motivating the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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