04 August 2005

Truth v. Honesty

So I'm happily, busily working on my screenplay which has its basic theme of truth invading a community and a friend of mine recently surfaced by email and asked what I was up to and I told him I was working on my screenplay. He responded "about truth?" and I replied yes, and he responded "but not honesty" with a winky face. He and I have gotten into a discussion about the difference between honesty and truth and my feeling is that there are certain undeniable truths for all of us - in other words, truth is not relative. He feels like truth is relative to your reality or some such thing and as much as I understand that he's driving at "beliefs" and a "belief system" I still contend that truth is truth. Maybe I'm missing something. Anyway, no matter how you slice it, you can't have honesty without truth but truth can lie fallow without anyone being honest with one another. Does anyone get the logic of that? Am I out of my ever lovin' mind? Come on, you can be honest with me....

3 comments:

Unknown said...

In college, I had a teacher who distinguished between truth and Truth. He claimed the the undeniable Truths existed and should be denoted with a capital "T", and the truths relative to our personal experiences should be denoted with a small "t". So perhaps you are both right.

Sanora Bartels said...

Fug that! I wanna be right, I wanna be right.....and that's the Truth, plshwlllt (Edith Ann raspberry sound). (By the way, I think truths relative to our personal experience come from the big Truths engaging our minds and souls so it's all the same to me.)

Anonymous said...

I take it as truth is fact, like science and Sherlock Holmes figuring out who the killer was. And that has very little to do with emotional honesty. Even Sherlock Holmes was not honest with himself and other about his opium problem.