If knowledge is power what is truth?

Today I'm going to be debating with myself. I've been thinking about Knowing the Truth a lot lately. How can one know what is really true? Is it a feeling, a fact? Because here are the facts, if one person KNOWS something is TRUE, but another person KNOWS that TRUTH to be FALSE then what in fact is TRUE?

Some would say every person has his own truth, but wait, yes i have an argument for that too, if one person KNOWS that if he runs off the cliff he will fall and die and that is TRUTH to him, but another person KNOWS that if he runs of that cliff he will in fact fly over to the other side without a scratch though he has never done it before and to him that is TRUTH, wouldn't that be considered false? Maybe that was a silly example but you get the idea. Therefore not everyone can have their own truth because they can contradict each other as well as the facts. But then you can get into what is really fact and yes i do have an argument against myself for that one too so I do not believe I will get into that today. For right now fact is fact. Gravity wins.

So if I have in fact disproved the idea that every man has his own truth, then what are my options left? That there is one truth only and that everyone who does not believe in that truth is wrong, a semi-christian belief, or that there is not truth at all just varying perspectives and the one that is agreed upon the most or the loudest is considered fact? The latter seems unlikely because a couple hundred years ago everybody KNEW that the world was flat, everybody KNEW that the earth was the center of the universe, and now look at what we know today. Sorry if I'm going a little Men in Black on yah, but its a good point. If we KNEW all that stuff was TRUE and it was in fact not, imagine what we will KNOW tomorrow. Yet I believe that this is the most socially excepted and expected form of truth. Evolution is one example.

If you don't believe it you're stupid, but polls show that the majority of people don't even know what all evolution covers, or even the real meaning. They just take the spoon feeding of so called experts that have a loud voice. Often times it is easier for us to understand a story than a truth, a perspective than a reality. Does it mean there can't be some grain of truth in evolution or perhaps even a whole truth? No, it could be true, but the fact that people trust in the loudest truth makes this argument interesting. Its the TRUTH that people hear the most so it becomes what they KNOW, but if what they KNOW turns out to not be the TRUTH then what? You're stuck at square one again.

So if the agreeing on one perspective that may or may not be true is not truth than what is? The christian belief of one truth, one way makes sense in a way, but it also requires a sense of faith and trust in a book that has a rather bloody and unpopular reputation. It also requires you to believe that EVERYONE else is wrong. If you think of it in terms of religion you can understand the significance of that statement. If everyone else is wrong, all religions, that means that those who have diligently memorized the whole frickin Qu'ran are just kidding themselves, their faith is useless and they will be sent to hell for KNOWING a different TRUTH than the one TRUTH. The atheists will for KNOWING something different, and a Bhuddist for his faith in the wrong TRUTH. Does that seem messed up to anybody besides me? This is actually the reason I began to think about truth.

We were at church a couple weekends ago and the pastor was preaching on Predestination, what I have previously believed to be an extremeist Calvinistic belief. Yeah...I was wrong...I had a very strong emotional reaction to what he was saying, upon further examination I realized why. If you do not understand the concept of predestination or have never heard of it before this may be a bit difficult to understand, but it basically means there are a certain group of people called 'the elect' that will go to heaven and the rest will roast in eternal damnation. The pastor was trying to convey that we should feel secure because of this, that our faith cannot be taken away from us. I wasn't relieved at all. Sure there is quite a large population of Christians on the planet, but there are also larger numbers of people who are not, people who KNOW something else to be TRUE and may be punished eternally for it.

It just does not seem right to me that knowing is such a terrible thing really...once you are committed you can't go back really or else it wasn't KNOWING in the first place. So the question I pose to you is what is TRUTH? A feeling, a knowing, a perception, a predestination? If none of those than what?