Blog: How do we know what's the Truth?

The world isn’t flat, is it?

Adam and Eve weren’t the first people on that planet, were they?

What is true and what is the Truth?

Just checking the league tables briefly in the global multi-millions “sport” of football, Manchester City is the best team in the land. That is factually correct, isn’t it? So how come we all idiosyncratically support Rovers, Stanley or even Burnley?

I have met and spoken with many senior CofE clerics, including Bishops and momentarily Archbishops. They are all well-read, highly-qualified, intellectually-robust men - the very point I want to explore.

The fact is that they are all men. I know no different than that they are all well-meant and honest men.

We have, according to the BBC, around 12,000 CofE clerics. Since being allowed 20 years ago, a third are now female. They are able to be ordained religious practitioners.

Just before we started our working lives, women working in banks, once married, were frowned upon. Lady teachers, so designated, were paid on different, yes, lower, pay scales.

We had WPCs, few lawyers were female, almost zero made it to the upper echelons of their learned craft. Most GPs and hospital doctors were blokes. No women fought on the front line of our armed services. A lot has changed, many taboos have been exorcised.

So what’s this got to do with the Truth & its pursuit and adhering to it.

I have heard this week and before, the argument that women just should not be able to become bishops.

Mainly by male clerics but by some female Church people too.

Their argument has its basis in matters both of Scripture (Biblical?) and Theology (ideological?).

Their reasoned and passionately-held point of view has exercised and challenged my thinking a great deal.

This isn’t exclusively about the Bishop issue. I’m wondering how we decide where we stand on things.

Few would agree about Manchester City being the best footie team in England, would they?

The world is definitely not flat, is it? And there is no scientific justification that Adam and Eve first inhabited this planet or that we are descended from them, is there?

But how often do you hear “I know for a fact…” when quite often they downright don’t, do they? Weird. Is it that it just sounds more persuasive than “In my opinion…”?

Or are things so deeply embedded deep down within our very inner cores, our souls, that we don’t realise that something we take as immutable “fact” is purely a deeply engrained superstition, opinion or belief?

Do we need to be more self-searching, more rigorous? When does opinion dressed up as fact become narrow-minded dogma?

Wonder what, how and why the General Synod did decide not to go with what seems obvious, lawful and right?

Graham Liver interviewed a relieved 'no' supporter on the radio the following day.

Liver was like a poor-man’s Paxman in his persistent perseverance with why he was opposed to women Bishops.

Eventually, if I believe my ears, it was because of the hes, hims, Man and Men in the Bible.

That was his Truth, was it?