Language and rhetoric are the flawed tools with which we attempt to communicate. I apologize if I used what little I have poorly.

There's relative truth and then there's absolute truth. We can't communicate, successfully, about absolute truth with one another. But we can codify our understanding of such absolute truth and then proceed to communicate about that truth all day long. That makes such a truth relative in nature. It becomes, "my truth," with which you can either identify with, or disagree with.

There is absolute truth hidden somewhere in our ideological similarity to one another. Our differences, which science likes to highlight because of what it is and the tools it uses, must surely be illusory if there is such a thing as absolute truth.

If there is no such thing as absolute truth, then, of course, we're just heaping more rhetorical relative truth onto the pile of excrement as you so eloquently stated. But I believe otherwise which, aside from the mutterings and misunderstandings of my religionist associates, makes me a theist. Or an agnostic. Depending on whose dinner party it is.

I used post-positivist and post-modernist thinking to typify the evolution of thought beyond the positivism that spawned the scientific method. My thinking about post-modernism as a philosophical system is that it is DOA. I think you agree with me on that point and for the same reasons.

But Wittgenstein wasn't just blowing smoke. Bertrand Russell's logic was impeccable, but it underscored the same post-positivist point: you can't use perception to identify that which is everywhere and in all things at all times and in all places. The Scientific Method, therefore, can not prove or disprove the existence of absolute truth since it utilizes perception, and perceptually biased thinking, as a crucial test of reality.

Is absolute truth necessary, then?

Obviously not. A simple map will suffice when it is only from point A to point B that we wish to travel. Yet my belief in such a relative truth (which is absolute relative to me) governs my attitude, my thinking and my behavior on my journey from A to B. The point Moses made was that this is true for all of us. It was and is a statement of ideological similarity among humans. As such we can either agree or disagree as to the importance of such a similarity, but I believe that such ideological similarity is the stuff of which any absolute truth will ever be made.

Rhetorical limitations held in abeyance, of course.

But do notice as we gradually erase the possibility of an absolute truth from our own minds how the relative truths take over our values and our actions such that we, ourselves, become our own absolute truth. In such a philosophical circumstance, Machiavellianism becomes the highest possible ideological achievement as we hack and slash at the available facts so that we might simplify our own search for relevance. Sometimes a simple map works, and sometimes our desire to fracture a whole reality into pieces leaves us without a working model. Quantum mechanics, I think, represents just such an example of a model that sometimes works, and sometimes misses the point.

So when I suggest that we can not successfully communicate absolute truth to one another, I am merely stating a limiting fact of human communication. The fact is, sometimes we get our point across, and sometimes we misunderstand the point made. That doesn't make all our attempts to communicate futile, it just suggests that we be far more careful about what we believe someone else is communicating to us. We need to identify the similarities as completely as we can before we start pouncing on the obvious differences.

Such thinking would have made all the wars fought in the name of religion completely unwarranted and the obvious travesty that they were. No matter who wins the Crusades, we are still a community of dust particles fighting over square footage on the same dust particle, completely oblivious to how tenuous our hold on our apparent form actually is.

And you are just as insane as all of us because you refuse to see yourself in those who annoy you. It is easy and joy-inducing to see our best qualities highlighted in others -- it instills a feeling of community. But when we see those parts of ourselves that drive us apart from others...well, we want to make it about all those "other" people, instead of placing the focus back on ourselves where we have some philosophical bedrock on which to build.

And again, we are quibbling over who gets to occupy which speck of dust on our communal dust particle. When we argue over which speck of dust is bigger, we are still arguing over dust. A crumb broken in half is not two half crumbs, it is two crumbs. Science versus religion is a crummy way to frame the argument. There are scientists who cling every bit as irrationally to their faith in human perception and its concommitant implication that no absolute truth can ever exist, as the tongue-pincering Catholics of the Spanish Inquisition.

The problem with religion isn't that it's a counterpoint to science, it's that it's just a perfect outlet for people who insist on clinging to authoritarianism. It is authoritarianism that's the problem, I would posit, not what ideas people pour their precious gift of faith into.

And the problem of authoritarianism has become inflamed in recent times to a global degree. "My authoritarian can whoop your authoritarian's butt," is what drives most of the arguments and open warfare in our world at the present time. It seems a great many of us have a need for a god in the flesh even though we're all supposed to be grown ups.

I, for one, am pleased that the Christians decided that they needed a Day of Judgment. One day is a good beginning. It is a necessary, but I think most would agree not a sufficient, start on a meaningful life experience.