the Truths

At every moment, in every place, a variety of incompatible truths circulate. Nowadays we've got the biological truth, the Catholic truth, the born again truth, the New Age truths, and the postmodernist nontruths. And many, many others. You can't really subscribe to more than two or three without becoming an ontological mess. I happen to be partial to mainstream, rational, academic truths. I believe in that which can be demonstrated by means of the conventional sciences and epistemologies. If the size of the universe, the speed of light, the limits of human machinations, the breadth of my knowledge can't make room for an idea, I reject it mercilessly. Hence my disdain for God, UFOs, ghosts, many conspiracies, terroir, and one thousand other jolly illusions. But I suspect that my predilection for the demonstrable is ultimately little more than class bias. When I endorse checking New Age truths against academic truths, I am baffled when I try to explain the ultimate benefit of subscribing to my truth. What is the value of finding out what an Oxonian scholar or a Nobel winner said if one is delighted by the assertions of a guy with a website? Even if I could convince every man, woman, and child who had ever stepped into the Salt Lake LDS Temple that Joseph Smith was an arrant knave, what would be the point? How would it benefit them?