Truth that Men Live By

This work dismantles the preconceived, outdated, and disparaged notions of truth in the post-modern era and then reconstructs a new paradigm in which religion, philosophy, and psychology all participate once again. Since this book aims to restore the interconnectedness between the political and the religious, I envision both pastors and political philosophers having the most to gain from digesting its contents. At the same time, since I draw upon many contemporary situations and events, the average public would identify with examples used in developing my arguments. By examining the rationales used for the second Gulf War and then tracing backwards the history of our cultural predisposition for imperial reach, the first section of the book seeks to expose how incongruous the culturally accepted wisdom is in relation to the our official religious creeds. The second section moves the conversation to reanimating the idea of truth, while rescuing it from the domains of religious fundamentalism and post-modern ambivalence. Resetting the ethical compass to point towards the humanistic segues into redefining religion outside the theistic and atheistic connotations. In turn, this allows the reader to value the attitudinal approach to religion more so than the specific dogma, or doctrine, to which one subscribes. This classification of religiosity type, if you will, is then arranged as that of the static kind whereas the other would be humanitarian. At this point, the contradictive nature of our cultural ethic is defined as the memetic boundary, while our transcultural morals would be understood as ideational. These two schematics help in constructing the supreme pairings for our comprehension of how people use certain religiosities and political imagination in approaching truth. From this, we reflect on how narratives assist in steering our acceptance of the respective religious mode and political outlook. And, then finally, the book closes with an analysis on how existential needs answered within man are instrumental in driving him to adopt either a more predominantly regressive political identity or one that is largely progressive. What sets this book apart is that it avoids a dry, lifeless study of epistemology for purely its own sake; instead, I draw upon various life experiences combined with enough recognizable popular, cultural references to firmly keep the conversation located in our current era and milieu. While the overall content is not intended to mimic a memoir, the anecdotes from my own life work to keep the discourse personable and hopefully alive. More importantly, the layering of the essays within the book work to expand the way we conceive of ideas such as truth, religion, and labels of political consciousness. This being the case, the arc of the manuscript's vision constantly challenges presuppositions that accompany said ideas. My perspective critiques the loss of dialogue between philosophy, politics, religion and psychology and then sets out to rebuild a fresh viewpoint where we no longer behave and interpret these fields of study as having nothing to say to one another.