A Different Kind of Truth

While my wife and I where in Omaha this weekend we ate at a 50's style diner.  When you go to a place like a fifties style diner you are not going to a "authentic" one, even if they say you are. You are instead going to someone's memory of a fifties diner.  The people who make these diners had such a good memory of the original diners that they wish to share their memory of that with the world.  This is always colored by what that persons experience of the diner was. 

This is not only true with theme restaurants though this pervades every part of our lives every museum that you have ever been to is the same way. You are not seeing history but someone's interpretation of history. I think the sooner to realize this the better off we will be. 

I'm not saying that we have to throw these things out because they are interpretations of history rather I think we need to rethink our idea of truth. I think that the modern world is a little too wrapped up in the idea for something to have truth it must also be factual. I don't think this is the case. In fact I would argue that allegory, prose, and poetry can have just as much truth in it as can actual factual stories. 

I also think it is important that we try to recognize what is allegory and what is fact when we come to it. I'm not saying one has any more importance than the other but if we recognize allegory as allegory we can then see the deeper layers of meaning in story. I think this is especially important when reading the scripture, though I think this skill should be employed when reading anything. 

We loose so much when we ignore allegory or short change it by trying to make it fact. If we could only realize that the someone's memory of a fifties diner, though not the real thing, still tells us something important about how people experienced the fifties diner then we might be able to find all kinds of truth that we never knew were there before.