Truth in Religion Class

This academic year, 2010/2011, for the first time I am assigned to handle religion subject in my workplace. As the material to discuss in class, I download those provided at T R U T H Since this is an international school, we are not limited to discuss only one religion. However, because the six students in the eleventh grade are Christian/Catholic, according the personal information they gave the school, I decided to discuss Christianity first.

In the first week, we discussed TRUTH. As you can see from the abovementioned website, TRUTH is divided into five ways, aesthetic truth, historical truth, moral truth, scientific truth, and the last one is religious or spiritual truth. After we discussed it in the classroom, I assigned my students to write around a one-hundred word paragraph to answer the question “What do you know about truth?”

In this post, I chose two writings of my students that I considered outstanding.

John:

In my opinion, truth is about reality and fact, something that is real and does exist. Why I say reality, it is something that is provable and shown and has truly happened with everyone agreeing in its existence; whether it is an event, an object, or a living being. Or Zeus.

In our current era, scientific truth is the most effective truth. Films are photos are no longer truth; mere words don’t always reach. Thanks a lot to photoshop. Other “truths” are not proving much, because modern era beliefs are far different from those the old era beliefs. Le prechaun, anyone?

However, the scientific truth has mostly brought down imaginations of the people; films get ridiculous, gets illogical, etc. for example, do aliens that are allergic to water exist? Will they attack earth which is ¾ water? Is this the truth? They are suicide.

Vanya:

The word ‘truth’ has actually lots of different meanings. When we hear ‘truth’ we generally think about facts that are proven and unbiased. As much as this definition is correct, it is not the only way we can define ‘truth’. Truth can also mean, especially in religion, something we believe in; or what we have faith in. For example, as a Christian, I may say that Jesus Christ is my ‘truth’, but there is no evidence that this is so; therefore non Christians may be skeptical about it.

In history, ‘truth’ has a slightly different meaning. Historians record what they think happened in the past from findings articles and artifacts. In a way, the historians create their own ‘truth’.

For me, though, personally, I think ‘truth’ is about what we know about ourselves, our beliefs, our world and our lives. It is what gives u a purpose to live.

Well, I must say that I enjoy this class perhaps because I consider my spiritual journey fulfilling enough. I want to share the similar stuff with those young students of mine.

Nana Podungge
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