Aron Ra on Truth

"The truth is what the facts are, and that’s what we should teach."

"In reality, there is no such thing as “absolute truth”. Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is only true to a degree. Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere. We don’t know everything about everything. We don’t know everything about anything! And what we do know, we don’t know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail. Honest men admit this. Anyone claiming to know the absolute truth is not being honest, especially not when they claim to know anything about things which can only be believed on faith. Even if men were given genuine revelations by truly omniscient beings, they must still be filtered and interpreted by weaker minds influenced by our limitations, biases, and misimpressions, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers."

"Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is. When allegedly holy men do the exact same thing, then its not called fraud anymore. Its called “revealed truth” instead. That’s quite a double-standard, innit? Like when some minister gets on stage at one of those stadium-sized churches -to state as fact who God is and what God is, and what he wants, hates, needs, won’t tolerate, or will do -for whom, how, and under what conditions; they don’t have any data to show they’re correct about any of it, yet they speak so matter-of-factly. Even when they contradict each other they’re all still completely confident in their own empty assertions! So why do none of these tens of thousands of head-bobbing, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed wanna-believers have the presence of mind to ask, “how do you know that?” Well, for all those who never asked the question, here’s the answer; they don’t know that! There’s no way anyone could know these things. They’re making it up as they go along. These sermons are the best possible example of blind speculation; asserted as though it were truth and sold for tithe. If anyone or everyone else would be called liars for claiming such things without any evidentiary basis then why make exceptions for evangelists? For these charlatans are obviously liars too! The clergy are in the same category of questionable credibility as are commissioned salesmen, politicians, and military recruiters."

"There is no question on whether the prophets existed. We are talking about whether the religions they invented were true. Can you show me the truth of that? Of course, they can’t. None of them can. They don’t want to. They don’t need to. I have seen people make that admission too."

"Now I would say that any honest earnest quest for truth must begin with the abandonment of faith. Are you prepared to lie in order to maintain your self-induced delusion? Or are you bold enough to question your own convictions and even test them to find out if they’re true, and discard them if they are not? That’s the rift. That’s the difference between us."

"Many of the strongest proponents of climate change are now coming out and saying “it’s simply not true?” Citations please? Who were the “top” proponents of anthropogenic climate change over the last decade or more? Has even one of them come out and said that it’s just not true? Because I gotta be honest here. . I smell bullshit."

"It is no hoax that mammalian embryos temporarily have pharyngeal pouches, which are morphologically indistinguishable from the gill slits in modern fish embryos, and that the divergence of development from there matches what is indicated in the fossil record. This is fact, not fraud. And none of these facts should be true unless evolution were true also."

"People that make up stuff and call it truth have the power to imagine all kinds of nonsense. But that’s what it is all about. It really is make believe, and it took me the longest time to figure that out. I thought, honestly, naively, even into middle age. I was in my 30s before I realised there were some people who do not believe what they do for a reason."

"Truth is really whatever can be shown to correspond to reality. Truth is what the facts are essentially. Facts are after all points of data that you can verify to be accurate. A lot of people hate these definitions because it completely undermines their theology. They can’t make the assertions that they want to by saying anything is the absolute truth, because under the definition of either word no you don’t!"

"Creationism offers no explanation whatever for anything while evolution offers a very comprehensive and demonstrably accurate explanation for an awful lot. And evolution is universally supported by an overwhelming preponderance of objectively testable evidence from every relevant field of study, while creationism is supported by nothing whatsoever outside of frauds, falsehoods and fallacies. There is literally no truth to it."

"If you can’t show that it’s true, then you can’t call it truth. Knowledge is similar to truth in that it a justified belief. Knowledge is demonstrable and testable with measurable accuracy. If you can’t demonstrate your knowledge to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then you don’t actually know what you think you do, no matter how convinced of it you are. Without evidentiary support, then it is only an empty assertion unworthy of serious consideration."

"Most Christians would say that evolution is one of God’s creative methods. But creationists reject that possibility outright, because the issue for them is not whether their God is true; but whether their dogma is true. It can’t be in any case. Even if current concepts of evolution were proven wrong tomorrow, Biblical creationism still couldn’t be true either, because it has already been disproved many times, many ways, and collapses on its own lack of merit. But of course believers can never admit that."

"Jack Chick was one of the skid marks in the tighty-whiteys of my generation, and the world is a better place that he’s not stinking it up with his fecal fallacies anymore. Welcome to oblivion Mr Chick, where you will rot without grace in a reality that never had a god in it, and where none of your lies ever came true. The only sad part is that the moment your brain shut off, you were never able to know how wrong you were about everything you ever said. You never even had the chance to be disappointed, and are blissfully unaware of your eternal failure, you miserable awful piece of shit."

"This is just my opinion, but when I listen to Muslims explaining their religion to each other, I get the impression that Islam is hateful and violent, but that it’s also pretty stupid; “full of shit”, as my dad would say -because none of it can be justified or shown to be true, and what little they do know can’t really imply what they say it does. The same thing goes for Christians. When I listen to Christians discussing their religion, I get the impression that they’re hateful too, but their violent reactions are culturally inhibited. So they compensate for that with a staggering level of bewildering stupidity, coupled with dishonesty. It sounds to me like pots and kettles accusing each other in the perfect example of the blind leading the blind. But when I listen to those Jews who still believe in God and the Bible, and I hear them arguing aspects of their beliefs, it strikes me that the foundation of Abrahamic religion is utterly empty, devoid of any possible meaning or value. I don’t want to say “who cares?”, because way too many people do. That’s what confuses and alarms me! How could anyone imagine that any of this is really true or really matters?"

"Convicted fraud and pseudoscience charlatan, Mister Kent Hovind argues that what has already been directly-observed and shown to be certainly true is impossible, and the only option he thinks is possible is that an imperceptible mystical being poofed everything out of nothing by magic. The irony is that what he proposes is physically impossible because it defies all natural laws, and it’s logically implausible since it has neither precedent nor parallel anywhere in reality to imply that it could still be true anyway. Where is there evidence anywhere that such a thing actually exists, or that anything even could have any of these abilities?"

"Each of the laws listed in the collection commonly and erroneously referred to as ‘The Ten Commandments’ were either already universal ordinances everywhere, adapted from Hammurabi’s stele of law from centuries earlier, or have no parallel in American jurisprudence. The laws of Moses are NOT our laws! The founding fathers made clear who their influences really were, and that their goal was a system of government directly opposed to everything Mosaic law or governance represented. To say that the Constitution was in any way inspired by any covenant between God and Moses is no less a lie than to say that America was founded on Biblical principles -which our textbooks also say. There is no truth in either of these statements. They were inserted to revise our history according to an overt agenda to instill and perpetuate conservative Christian authority. This is a major front of the fundamentalist Christian “culture wars” against honest, factual reality. There is no defense of these errors and no justification for imposing them as part of ‘education’. Our textbooks are demonstrably false and deliberately misleading, and they must be corrected."

"I can show you the truth of evolution. I can show you the facts of evolution. I can show you the positively indicative and physical evidence that is exclusively concordant with one conclusion over any other. I can do that all day, but religion can’t. No religion can because they’re all just made up. They don’t have any truth at all in them, none of them. The best that you can get out of people is that they can give anecdotal nonsense or will cite logical fallacies or they will say, “Somebody wrote once that there were Christians back in the 1st century and that means Jesus existed."

"No matter what, creationists will not admit that anything we ever find can fulfill Darwin’s prediction of transitional intermediates. This is why creationists demand only monstrous absurdities or issue challenges they know still couldn’t be satisfied no matter how true evolution may be; because they know already that whatever they insist on seeing today we may show them tomorrow, and if that happens, they’ll have to make up new excuses for why it still doesn’t count. So they won’t request to see anything evolution actually requires, and they usually won’t define any criteria they would accept either, because they already know they won’t accept anything even if we show them everything they ever ask for."