Would you be so kind to oblige me, and define the difference, in your view, between facts and truth?

Rex, in Dalamatia they tried to teach man the use of steam power, but he was too afraid. Wouldn't this count as an example of epochal revelation imparting unearned knowledge?

Facts are, by definition, always true.

Greetings fanofVan,

Interesting observations.


I'm sure there were many individuals with assurance and certainty of the existence of God who had a very primitive and backward knowledge of cosmology. Knowledge about God is not the same as experience with God. Anybody with a reasonably normal mind can experience God, and that experience is not contingent upon intellectual knowledge or learning.



But neither of them actually delivered the facts of universe reality. Facts have to do with material things. They were not allowed to reveal unearned knowledge. I think what the two headquarters did was attempt to reveal the truths of the universe rather than the facts of the universe.



I think that in order to know about God, we have to know the facts; but, to actually know God as a personal experience the facts are not as important. Wouldn't knowing God within a relationship have to do with truth? I thought that as we grow in personal experience with God's nature we discover new meanings for facts we already know.(see quote below). In a way, facts must have personal meaning (relatable to living realty). If facts only have an intellectual meaning, then they are not alive.

Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience. 101:1:4

We are told that we're supposed to learn to discern the difference between what is value and what has value (see quote below). What is value is something that is alive: facts with new spiritual meanings in relationship to Deity (a person). What is value is a function of a person relating to reality. What has value is part of a thing within reality. A person is value; a thing potentially has value. Facts are things until they are given spiritual meaning within the context of personality relationships.

In the contemplation of values you must distinguish between that which is value and that which has value. You must recognize the relation between pleasurable activities and their meaningful integration and enhanced realization on ever progressively higher and higher levels of human experience.
Meaning is something which experience adds to value; it is the appreciative consciousness of values. An isolated and purely selfish pleasure may connote a virtual devaluation of meanings, a meaningless enjoyment bordering on relative evil. Values are experiential when realities are meaningful and mentally associated, when such relationships are recognized and appreciated by mind. 100:3:3-4



I may be wrong, but I thought cosmology has to do with the organization of the universe, primarily an external reality. I think what I learned about the universe is very useful to know. It's humbling to know how vast it is and how small we are. Knowledge of the existence of morontia reality has also been useful since it answered many, many questions I had. I also think it is very useful to know how it teems with a tremendous variety of different types of life both mortal and divine. I find it extremely comforting to know that they are all working on the same team and that friendliness is the standard mode of behavior.

The revelations I have found most useful in the Papers have to do with the inner world, particularly the soul, the relationship between me and my Adjuster. That alone was really all I had to read to make the book a keeper. It was like fireworks going off for me. Yes, that's all facts when written down in the text, but it translates into something beyond fact for me. It has new meaning in terms of my relationship to God and reality. It's personal. It's true, beautiful and good.

In Friendship,
Rexford

Truth doesn't need facts. Read any work of fiction and you can find truth and no facts (at least, none relative to "objective reality"). I'd never say that facts are "always true" -- they can only be "relatively true." The facts of almost any given story are true with respect to the story itself, but hardly ever to the story of you and me.

I'm wondering about your statement. Up until the late medieval ages, geocentrism was accepted as settled fact, but that fact was not true, not even close.

Facts are rigid and inflexible; it's their meanings that change.

Truth has meaning, facts just ARE; they don't have a 'meaning that changes'.

I agree that facts just ARE, and that we often misinterpret facts and give them erroneous meanings. That is precisely why the meaning of facts change. Meanings are suppose to change, not the facts themselves

-obviously though, cosmology is not limited to material or time and space "facts".

When we 'misinterpret facts and give them erroneous meanings' we create a fallacy. A fallacy is the opposite of a fact. The 'meaning of facts' doesn't 'change'. Our human understanding/ interpretation of/ perception of them changes as we realize a previously thought fact is actually a fallacy.

I am also curious about your phrase "meanings are suppose(d) to change". Really? There is no enduring meaning in the universe? Our Father's love for us and his requirement that we learn to love one another as brothers has a profound meaning. Is that meaning supposed to change?

I agree with you that experience helps us discover new meanings from existing facts. Human understanding evolves, improves over time. So, in that sense, our ability to perceive meanings of things also evolve and improve over time. But the facts and meanings themselves don't change.