by Tracy Baker

Created on: September 21, 2009

Beginning as young children, we are all taught through others, or by our own experiences, that there are many absolute truths that come with living on this planet. It is absolute truth that you will burn your finger if you stick it in a lit candle. It is absolute truth that you can severely injure yourself if you jump off a four-story building. It is absolute truth that if you get stuck under water long enough you will drown. But while most of us can agree that these are in fact absolute truths, there is at least one person on this planet who has stuck their finger in a burning candle and didn't get burned. There is at least one person on this planet that has jumped off of a four-story building without getting so much as a scratch, and there is also someone out there who has been stuck under water and has lived to tell the tale. Although absolute truth does exist, it isn't static. It varies from person to person depending on their life experiences, and what they have been taught.

For instance, most of us believe that the sky is blue, the sun is yellow, and the grass is green. We all believe these to be absolute truths because we were all taught our colors around the age of three or four. But what if instead, we had been taught that the color blue was really brown, that the color yellow was really pink, and that the color green was really purple? Then the absolute truth we all know now would cease to exist. Instead, we would look up into the wild brown yonder, at the pink tones of the noon sun while sitting in the vast fields of dark purple grass. Although a blue sky, a yellow sun, and green grass is absolute truth to us now, it would be absolutely false had we been taught something else.

The religions that we have created and hold so dear are the same. There are many who see their own religion as absolute truth and the other religions as absolutely false. Some are so sure that theirs is the only absolute truth that they are willing to kill to prove it. But once again, the only thing that makes a person's religion absolute truth is their own experience of being that particular religion. Let's say that we had a time machine and could go back into the past to the birth of Osama Bin Laden. And right after his birth, we swiped him from his mother's arms and took him to be raised by an American family in Idaho. The absolute truths he carried would have been completely altered and instead of being the instigator of 9-11, he would have simply been another witness

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