Someone used to say to me, “Your logic is flawed.” They used to say it often. It was a passive-aggressive way of telling me I was wrong – a lot. I believed them because I heard it so many times.
I looked up the word logic and believe it or not even scholars cannot agree on its meaning. So here’s what I’ve chosen: logic is deductive reasoning. It seems to me that logic is relative to scientific reasoning and not so much to truth.
As children, we don’t really know truth apart from fantasy or lies. Our truth is made to order by our care givers. For example: Jennifer is your sister; touching a hot stove will hurt; Santa Claus won’t come if you’re a bad girl. At the age of 2 these truths are indisputable because Mom and Dad told you so and everyone else acknowledges it.
At the age of 12 something has changed: Jennifer is still your sister; touching a hot stove will still hurt but Santa ... yeah not so much. After noticing that the Santa in the three malls your mom dragged you out to is three different people, the process of deductive reasoning begins. It seems only logical that Santa is a hoax.
By the time you turn 21 you begin to realize that sometimes people lie and what you always believed as truth is fiction. Jennifer is not really your sister; she’s your mother who had you out of wedlock and your “mom” is really grandma. Santa? Long forgotten. The stove remains the only constant.
You can change the filter through which you perceive. You can decide not to trust anyone. You can even test out the hot stove theory – I gotta touch it to believe it. The point of it really is this – truth is immutable. There are many truths that are not logical. You can waste a good part of your life trying to fight the truth but at the end of the day – a hot stove might be an easier hurt to heal from.
Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” He didn’t realize that Truth was looking right into his eyes. He didn’t even notice that Jesus didn’t answer him. I don’t think he wanted to know the truth because had he known he would have had some decisions to make instead of washing his hands of it.
I spent the better part of my life accepting other people’s truth as my own without further investigation. I think, somewhere deep inside, I was afraid it would require action on my part, the action of dealing with pain, offering forgiveness, and moving on. The real truth is, sometimes truth hurts and sometimes it doesn’t. But you can always depend on truth as remaining unalterable. Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6)
When I speak the truth, my logic may “sound” flawed, but it’s not really “my” truth it’s the Truth.
