@monsoon. Precisely… and this kinda responds to LottoWrett too, in that he mentions faith, if you believe something, its true to you. If something is believed in collectively by a large number, that’s reassuring and can strengthen your shared truth psychologically, but it doesn’t make it any more real. Truth now-a-days, in our scientific and “enlightened era”, does seem to have more strength though, because of empiricism, the scientific method that states that for something to be true it must be testable and observable, but that doesn’t always work, our senses can fool us… examples could include, and there are countless more…
The earth appears flat, but we know from alternative observation that this is not the case.
Work in quantum physics, where, annoyingly, mere observation of phenomena changes results of experiments.
Optical illusions, our senses are telling us one thing, its only higher reasoning that tells us otherwise.
We have to be very careful of truth… just look at the arab-Israeli conflict under this context.
Oh, and *AstroChuck, your right… Jesus said something like “its the truth” and Pilate replied “Quod est Veritas” – “what is truth?” Christians tend to think of that as Pilate asking Jesus a question he did not know the answer to… I prefer to think of it as irony, he was making a point… its one of my favourite passages in the Bible and always makes me smile.