WHAT IS TRUTH?

Dana Loesch reports on an ABC News article that says former President Carter is leaving the Southern Baptist Church over its interpretation of the role of women in the church. Apparently, church leaders at their June convention voted to no longer allow women to serve as pastors. I guess that this is more offensive to him than his buddies at Hamas strapping bombs to retarded women and sending them out to blow themselves up. Of course, this does show an enlightened attitude on the part of Hamas, allowing women to do everything that a man can do.

ABC says that Carter intends to remain in his post as deacon of his Baptist church. How can he retain a position of authority in a church that he has left? This reinforces my perception of Carter as someone that is confused and indecisive, the two defining characteristics of his administration.

This also highlights a flaw in the Protestant system of decentralized power in religion. I'm Catholic and am not saying that we get everything right, far from it. However, the idea in Protestantism that every man is his own Pope, able to interpret scripture and tradition to his own liking, seems to set the stage for a total lack of respect for the truth. It seems to me that truth exists and is knowable. My agreement with or acceptance of this truth has no bearing upon its existence. Because God is truth, truth is.

Protestantism seems to me to in some ways to encourage people to run from truths that they don't like. Protestants can always find a church that agrees with them. If the church at some point strays too far from their beliefs they seem to feel that they can go look for another or maybe start one of their own. I know that I am making a broad generalization here but I have seen this happen enough to know that it is a major problem in the Protestant world.

Catholics do this to some extent, also. However, due to the more centralized and powerful nature of the church, changing parishes will normally still not change the teaching all that much. Unless they find a parish and priest that have strayed so far off the reservation that they are for all intents and purposes schismatic. At that point, the parish is more closing following the pattern set by Protestantism and its members are only marginally Catholic anyway.

There are many teachings in the Catholic Church that I have struggled with over the years. Because I don't have the freedom to follow my own idea of the truth, but accept that the church is the pillar and foundation of truth (Timothy 3:16), I have been forced to reconcile my personal beliefs with the truth taught by the church. This process has caused me to have a much deeper and richer understanding of the world around me. Had I run to the next church that taught what I believed was the truth, my growth as a Christian and a person would have been truncated.

Does this underlying idea that truth is situational serve as a root cause for the confusion men like President Carter experience? Has his experience in a world filled with truths of his own making made him incapable of seeing truth clearly enough to act upon it? I don't know.

Just something that I wonder about from time to time.