I've been thinking about my Christian friends and their belief systems. Every belief system is built on a set of axioms. Axioms of a belief system are a set of assumptions which are accepted as being true without any evidence or proof.
I have three assumptions ─ axioms, if you like ─ which are basic to my views. They have to be assumptions because they can't be shown to be correct without first assuming they're correct. They are ─
1. That a world exists external to me,
2. That my senses are capable of informing me of that world, and
3. That reason is a valid tool.
Fortunately for me, anyone who posts here thereby shows they agree with 1 and 2, and let's hope 3 as well, so we have that common set of starting points. But feel free to disagree, of course.
If someone has an axiom you don't hold as true, then language they use will sound crazy or insane when it is implicitly using the axiom.
In the religious context, I suspect that often it involves a failure to define basic ideas and entities with sufficient clarity.
And a failure to distinguish the purely conceptual / imaginary from the objectively real, that which exists in the world external to the self.
When we speak, all the ideas coming out of our mouths will be perfectly aligned with our axioms.
Hmm. In serious conversation I certainly wish that were the case.
Many times, for axioms of a belief system to become absolute TRUTH, they have to be repeated over and over again until they sink into long term memory. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." a quote from George W Bush.
Truth is one of those things that in my view is far too often left without a clear definition. I use the "correspondence" definition: truth is a quality of statements, and statements are true to the extent that they correspond with / accurately reflect objective reality (ie the world external to the self).
The reason why we have so much political division in this country is Republicans and Democrats have a completely different set of axioms in their belief systems. For example, "Q is a patriot" a quote from Marjorie Taylor Greene.
You may be aware of research from a decade or so ago which pointed out that conservatives ─ in this case Republicans ─ tend to be afraid of new experiences and to avoid them, whereas liberals ─ in this case Democrats ─ tend to enjoy new experiences. That's why Trump's wall was an essentially Republican piece of politics, independently of whether clear barrier boundaries are a good idea or not.
Axiom: There is only one absolute truth, and that is, all belief systems are built on a set of axioms.
I respectfully disagree ─ there's only one absolute truth ─ "Outside this sentence there are no absolute truths."