It seems the more I write these columns, the less they deal with specific issues, and the more they focus on the overarching problems we face as humans interacting with each other in society. I blame the philosophy department for this, but I hope they understand that this sort of blame only says good things about them.

Before I go further, I should warn anyone wishing to cling to dogma to stop reading right now. There is nothing valuable for a dogmatic person in this particular column, and there may even be a few things that those content with the way things are at this moment would find annoying. Specifically, the sorts of things that just burrow into your head and make normal life difficult. I’m going to talk about intellectual dishonesty and delusion in pursuit of the Truth.

Intellectual dishonesty is probably the biggest problem we encounter when we all sit down to discuss things as a society. It seems people walk up to the table and say, in a very matter of fact voice, “I have the Truth.” Of course, if everyone had the Truth, as so many seem to think they do, I highly doubt we’d ever argue over “facts.” But the fact is, we do argue over the “facts” because we don’t have the Truth; we’ve simply convinced ourselves we do.

In the arts, this isn’t much of a problem. One person says to another, “That play was amazing!” and the other responds, “Eh, it was all right I guess.” While there may be a short discussion afterward, everyone tends to go home content that their opinion was heard, even if others did not agree with it.

When we have discussions that bring up religion, for some reason, the day doesn’t end quite so well. One person says to another, “I think your beliefs are stupid,” and the other responds, “I hate you,” or, even more ridiculous, “I hope someday you can know the error of what you are saying.”

So now, if I haven’t already made a controversial statement, I’ll try again. When we say that we have some sort of universal truth, that we know everything there is to know, or at least everything that is important, we are lying. Flat-out lying. Not only are we lying to others, we are lying to ourselves; we are either being intellectually dishonest or suffering from some sort of delusion.

It is this sort of lying that prevents us from conducting ourselves in a respectable manner when it comes to religion. When we talk about religion, we stop basing our judgments off of what we observe to be the case and start making claims about what “is” and therefore “ought” to be the case for everyone. We mistake our personal truth for the Truth.

If people aren’t angry enough yet, I should say that there is no religion that serves as an objective standard of the Truth. It’s impossible for religion to discuss objectively issues such as homosexuality, abortion or others’ beliefs about these topics.

Why? Religious beliefs deal with personal or subjective truth. We have no way to objectively decide what’s right or wrong for others in these cases, only what’s right or wrong for ourselves based on our beliefs.

I should point out that I am not trying to say that every attempt to talk about the Truth is worthless; I’m simply saying that we need to be honest with ourselves when we debate issues as explosive as religion.

Your belief that someone is wrong does not automatically make individuals evil, or even wrong for that matter. If believing were all that was needed to make something true, Bigfoot and Santa would be sitting down to tea with the Easter Bunny and the Roswell aliens right now. To my knowledge, they are not.

It seems, then, that we have to admit there’s something more to the Truth than simply believing.

My own personal belief is that we ought to stop trying to make our personal beliefs seem as if they are eternal truths. The fact is that believing in something does not make it the Truth—simply a truth—dependent on all the same assumptions as other subjective truths, and ultimately only applicable to ourselves.