I can't remember the last time I was asked that question because it has been many years. Nor do I remember my response to the questioner but it no doubt contributed to not being asked the question since. Are you in the Truth? It's kind of a loaded question because Truth is interpretive. But there's Truth on which we can all agree, and I beg you to bear with me through this long post, and please don't allow your sensibilities to be offended by the next paragraph. Years ago your father inserted his penis into your mother's vagina and ejaculated. A single sperm cell among millions combined with a receptive egg cell and you were conceived. You were squeezed or cut out of your mother's womb, naked and wet with mucus and blood, screaming from the sudden chill on your body and searing light in your eyes and so you came to be. It is how your story began.You don't remember any of it, but you know it is true. You can watch live births on public television or Youtube and maybe you're a parent and have actually taken part in the entire process. There's no other way it happens. You know with complete confidence it is true. You have a mother and a father. Whether or not you actually know who they are is secondary. They had parents, too, and so did their parents, and on and on down the line. You may know the names of your grandparents, but may not know who your great grandparents were. If you make a concerted effort, you can trace your ancestry back three or four hundred years, but here is where Truth becomes a little less definite. Extramarital liaisons have been going on from time immemorial. There is a large statistical chance that somewhere along the line the bloodline is broken, but that does not change the fact that you are the result of sexual reproduction going back at least many thousands of years. You know this to be true. Fossils exist. We know this to be true. We can see them at the Smithsonian, at the Museums of Natural History in New York and London, and in thousands of locations around the world. There exist, embedded in rock, the mineralised bones of dinosaurs that had sharp, dagger-like teeth. Some are complete skeletons within which are found the jumbled bones or fragmented eggshells of other animals, on which there are marks consistent with laceration and mastication. While we were not around to see it happen, we can reasonably assume the larger animal killed and ate the smaller one, or ate another animal's clutch of eggs. We can kill and cut open a modern, sharp toothed carnivour and see the same marks on its stomach contents, ergo we extrapolate truth, much like we do of our own personal beginnings, from what we can observe first hand. Elements decay in precise, predictable timelines. We know this to be true. Elemental decay, or transition, is the essential mechanism of atomic clocks that track time to within 0.0000000001 seconds/day, accuracy so profound it is difficult to comprehend. While temperature plays a role in the accuracy of atomic clocks, they would still be remarkably accurate if operated within the complete range of temperatures that allow life to exist. Ergo, from the rate of decay of the elements in the rock surrounding the fossilized bones of ancient animals we can determine with considerable accuracy when the animal died, even if there is no possible way anyone could have observed it first hand. We can with complete confidence say that carnivorous animals existed millions of years ago. There are also the mineralised bones of human beings, and extinct beings that are not quite human but which possessed some human-like characteristics, that are imbedded in the rock. We know this to be true. We can see these, too, in the same places we can see mineralised dinosaur bones, and we can calculate their age much in the same way we calculate the age of the bones of dinosaurs. Truth is based on evidence and when evidence is crushing the only contrarian defense that remains is it may have been manipulated or misrepresented or maybe just misunderstood. But the precision of elemental decay cannot be manipulated, misrepresented or misunderstood, else all of the products of science that depend on it - like GPS and frequency transmission to name but two - wouldn't work. We may not know how, but we know that the GPS in our car works, ergo someone figured out the science behind it. We know this is true. Here's a tiny fragment of the Truth. You exist because you were conceived as the consequence of a sexual act and you were subsequently born into the world. You don't remember any of it, but you know it is true because there is irrefutable evidence you can observe yourself. The evidence also tells us that animals walked the earth millions of years ago and ate other animals, effectively countering beliefs of anti-diluvian vegetarianism. And, unless all those scientists are deliberately trying to deceive us (and somehow get our GPS to work, too), human beings and human-like beings existed long before 6,000 years ago. You can draw your own parallel from that. To paraphrase Col. Jessup's famous line in "A Few Good Men", can you handle the Truth?
