What is truth said jesting Pilate

 And would not wait to hear the answer.


As the great Anglican theologian, E L Mascall put it (whose sadly didn't in the end convert),

For there is really nothing academic, in the pejorative sense, about the notion of Truth at all. It lies at the base of all sane human intercourse, civilized and uncivilized alike. It is what children are taught to tell and what even liars hope they will be thought to be telling. It is what every witness in a court of law is placed under oath to respect and for disregard of which he may be sentenced for perjury. The capacity to recognize it differentiates man from the brutes. It is the ground of what I have described as the Intellectual Principle. And that, as I said at the beginning, is so obvious that hardly anyone but philosophers and theologians would think of questioning it.

and Pope Benedict is firm that truth cannot ever be relativised, as the modern world, to the left and the right and the centre of politics is so fond of doing.

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