Worldviews, Literature, Truth

I learned something in college. All truth is God's truth. After hearing this phrase countless times, it stuck. And I think it's true.

It transformed the way I took in pretty much all media. There's a lot of fantastic, weird, beautiful, inspirational, memorable things out there. The process of finding God's truth amidst His creations' creations is one worth going through.

I stopped judging whatever I was taking in based solely on a "morality scale" a while ago. I reasoned it more important to get the whole picture than to simply be offended with specifics.* I'm OK with looking at a rough, dirty wall if I have the chance to catch glimpses of light coming in through the cracks.

So anyways, I read a couple of books this year. I haven't much else to do.

The first is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I loved this story. It was forever long. It went super in-depth on a number of characters. She used her characters as archetypes, but the characters evoked empathy. She made architecture seem interesting. Basically, in my opinion, it was a well written story. That's the truth I found in this book. Our God created the whole idea of "stories" and I think her presentation of one was spot on. Unfortunately, I wasn't really down with her general thesis of the greatness of the individual man. Although there are those individuals who occasionally do great things, I think we need each other.

In comes the second book: Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. I've already blogged about this book a little bit but it agrees with The Fountainhead in that humanity has a lot of potential. It differs by proposing that we all need each other. Despite the harm that can come from a lot of human constructs, we are also the answer to much of the harm. And this is where I agree/disagree.

I certainly agree that we, as humans, can do a lot of good for each other. But (here's where I may disagree) at the core of every person, we are in need of a savior. I'm not certain of Steinbeck's exact theology, but his story is chockfull of beautiful examples of a redeemed society that looks out for each other; I'm just not sure where he finds redemption.

Those are my recent truth findings.


*That is, until the issue of pornography comes into play. And, if you were wondering, some examples would be the glorification of violence in movies like 300 or the crude jokes in most Judd Apatow movies.