I once made an absurd statement to my friends. I said "There are no facts."

There are no facts.

What I meant by this was that there is no universal truth, that everything is distorted by the person perceiving the truth. It has been shown time and again that science is fallible and constantly changing; what we take as fact one year may not be the same thing the next. Case in point, Newton's laws, which were largely accepted as "truth" until Einstein turned them on their ear.

I then talked about how what I though of as yellow could be green for someone else, not in that the wavelengths of light were different, but that the way my brain interpreted color was different is different. There are people who make strong associations between color and other symbols, for instance the letter "C" might "look" green to these people. Perceptions are different because our senses are fallible, and since our senses connect us to the world, the way we perceive the world is not necessarily the way it really is. Our brains are left to interpret shadows of reality, shadows which may be different for different people.

So obviously I got made fun of, so I gave it up and we moved on to other topics.

It was really my misuse of the word fact that got me in trouble. A fact is, as tim three put it, "an opinion with monopoly power". An opinion. So a large number of people, a group of scientists for instance, can get together and decide that some theory is correct, because none of their experiments have been able to disprove it. The theory becomes a fact, but as this does not necessarily make it universally true.

Even everyday things, like the fact that I went to work today, can be disputed. Things like that are contestable because my boss could say he didn't see me at work and therefore I was not there, never mind the fact that my boss works at home, and I work at the office. This is a fictional example of the people with the power rewriting history to their own advantage. In this case, maybe my boss doesn't want to pay me. Even what I think is the truth could be false, if I was dreaming or in a coma or something. Even facts like this, which are irrefutable to one person, can easily be doubted by some other person.

Science and religion have, still are, and probably always will contest the true nature of the Universe. Everybody seems to think they have the "right" answer. You can blame it on God, or you might think the Universe just sort of did it itself (i.e. Big Bang), or maybe you just don't know. The truth is in dispute, and people or communities of people that share the same views like to tell everybody else what the "truth" is.

So in the end, for me, there are widely accepted truths and facts which aren't absolute truths. I feel that it's up to the individual to find their own truths, especially in matters of spirit. A person can alway try to convince you that what they think is true *is* the one truth, but really, there's as many truths as there are people to interpret the world multiplied by the number of things there are to interpret.

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