Transcendent Truth

Posting more today than ever before; so I apologize for the overflow of information in a single day...Typed this up a few weeks ago and questioned whether to post; now I will.

Transcendent truth: Truth woven across the fabric of humanity

Recently I have been struck by the fact that many people, in completely different places are coming up with the same ideas, seemingly independent from one another. The fact that a person in Australia is thinking about the same movies as me; that a girl in Washington State is parsing through Walker Percy and having a similar response to his literature, speaks to me of transcendent truth. This idea of transcendent truth spits in the face of the relativist, who claims that there are no moral absolutes, maintaining that life is nonsense and ethics merely a social construct. Commonality in the midst of chaos does not make sense.

This topic is something that I think about quite often, but one that I rarely comment on, because honestly I feel like I cannot adequately address all of its complexities. Yet, today, I’ve decided to broach it.

A movie that I watched recently called “The Cult of Sincerity” does a pretty good job of addressing the conundrum for the relativist, basically saying that the relativist isn’t really free to make claims about anything. In essence, if what the relativist claims is really true (which in and of itself is an oxymoron), then we might as well stop caring and sit on the couch eating ice-cream and watching pornography all day long.

You can watch one of my favorite scenes from “The Cult of Sincerity” exploring this topic here:



In this scene, two of the characters debate the unfairness of the world, and question one another’s views of right and wrong. The male character challenges the female on her assumptions, questioning how she can believe that some things are evil without a moral framework for doing so. They have a discussion that runs something like this:

Male: “Babies are delicious, c’mon…”

Response: “Stop, that’s deeply offensive”

If people claim there is no transcendent morality, then-as the male character says-we might as well be eating babies and showing kids pornography. Even the thought of such acts disgust most of us. In essence what this film is saying is consider this: postmoderns claim there are no absolutes, but reality sings a different tune. Each day the sun rises and sets. Some things are beautiful, and some are not. There is brokenness in the world. There is goodness in the world. Such a thing as truth exists. Existence is not meaningless.