[cdn2wheeler]

Angela makes a very good point (she's pretty smart). Various institutions have, at different times in history, declared that they are somehow keepers of truth. Not all of those institutions have been religious, though many of them have been. Governments have also been guilty of it (see Dubya's insistence of WMDs in Iraq, or the mythical benefits of supply-side economics) and corporations use their version of the truth all the time to further their own agendas ("Your call is important to us. Please wait for an operator." - well, if the call was important, you wouldn't stick me into voice-jail, would you? And the truth-telling veracity of many sales departments verges on the infinitesimal. I know, I've worked with them.)

Institutional truth seems to have generated a backlash that's been called "post-modernism" - that is, there is no objective truth, there's only subjective truth. My truth is different from your truth because our perceptions may be different.

But that doesn't work either. If an apple falls from a tree, it's going to hit the ground (or whatever's underneath it). Doesn't matter if I perceive it or you perceive it, the apple's going to fall regardless of whether we're there or not.

(Which leads me to a joke: If a man is talking in the forest and no woman is there to hear him, is he still wrong? But I digress...)

Perhaps "truth" is one of those concepts that's similar to "quality." Pirsig, in his brilliant work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, dissects the concept of "quality" in this way. I won't try to summarize the book here; I simply suggest that you read it for yourself. It's time well spent; you won't regret picking it up.