Fence Sitter wrote:TAO,
I have my doubts about the ability of man to know absolute truth. ( I am not even sure what it is.) Your statement above is a good example.
This is understandable, absolute truths are hard to come by, and oftentimes, when you think you have them, it turns out they are a sub-part of an even MORE absolute truth =D.
I think it is clear in your mind (or maybe not) what it means to you, but I also think you would agree that your understanding of it may change in the future, even if the change is to understand it better.
Oh, undoubtedly, my sense of understanding will come to better understand it in the future, but it is still an absolute truth. You can still learn things about absolute truths; over time, you start applying that absolute truth in more ways throughout your life. For some reason, you have a subconscious hesitation to apply any 'absolute truths' immediately... it takes time. So though it is an absolute truth, I don't live it absolutely, although I am trying.
In that sense I do not believe you can claim to know it as absolute truth as you yourself do not fully understand it.
This could be the case - but even the sub-cases of 'absolute truths' are near close to absolute... so close in fact, that they hardly make a difference, from my experiences (although I could be wrong).
For example... I could have said... a life without purpose is pointless... yet there is point to living without purpose. Instead I used worthless, because it is of no value to you to live a life without purpose, value being something permanent. In a life without purpose, all decays to dust, making life worthless.
In other cases, I believe, we have the absolute truths, we just have a hard time living them, and in that case, it's really that we don't trust them fully, but they are still absolutes.
We are a work in progress TAO, what we think we know now will not be the same as what we thing we know at a later time.
Very true, very true, but so do we also
not know that what we see actually exists; we live in a world based on trust, simply because living a life taking no risks would be worthless. We take the risk that all of our sense could be deceiving us, so that our life has worth. I take absolutes as existing, because without them, life would be chaotic, and for me, worthless. I have an embedded sense of purpose, so to say.