Life, truth, and reality are worldview topics. They are abstract concepts because they cannot be placed under a microscope to see and understand them better. Every person has a worldview, but not every person is deliberate in developing his or her worldview. We all have a philosophy of life but many would be hard pressed to provide an analysis of their worldview. Where does a worldview come from? How has it been developed over time? What influences a worldview? What does it take to change one's worldview?

If by "life" we mean biological life, we can gather details by using the procedures of empirical science to identify the differences between life and no life. The same science cannot examine life as a philosophical concept. It involves much more than breathing, eating and moving. Life is a certain way of thinking, and thoughts cannot be put under a microscope or in a laboratory beaker for the purpose of discovery from performing experiments.

Truth is not derived from laboratory experiments. Truth has no material substance. It is a philosophical concept. It is an extremely powerful concept, but it is not a thing we can see with our eyes or touch with our fingers. In some basic ways truth is inherent to our humanity. In other ways truth is something we learn over the span of time during which we are able to learn. Truth can best be learned in comparison to falsehood. Unfortunately, postmodern gimmickry has made the distinction between truth and falsehood much more complicated for those with a postmodern bent of mind.

This brings us to reality. Reality is what it is without the gimmickry. A person can call an elephant a tree but doing so does not change the reality of the elephant or the tree. There was a time when a break from reality gave rise to the condition of insanity. Cultural concepts are always in a state of flow, but a denial of reality is not something one would expect to "flow" with culture. Until recently reality was a fixed thing. The tree is a tree. The elephant is an elephant. No sane person would argue otherwise.

Yet there are now a fairly significant number of people who have ventured down a very silly path--a walk into lethal darkness. Whether we like it or not, human personhood needs some things that are actually real. We can fantasize. We can dream. We can imagine. But we cannot survive without certain boundaries between what is real and what is conjured up in our own mind.

Consider the question of human identity. It is possible to change one's life. A dentist can become a farmer. A good man can become an evil man. But neither the dentist nor the farmer can become a hippopotamus or a mushroom. A woman can think of herself as a man, but she has no physical capacity to make herself into a man. This is straight-forward empirical science that can be denied but never refuted.

Reality is what it is. Truth is derived from reality. Truth is an affirmation of reality. A jury is expected to discern from evidence whether a defendant has committed a crime. The evidence cannot come from what is only in a witness's head. A doctor is expected to discern a patient's medical condition using evidence gathered by scientific exploration. No one who is deathly sick wants a doctor who utilizes intuition rather than scientific analysis.

No apologies are offered for this website being reading intensive. I might share a photograph once in awhile for aesthetic purposes, but I see little value in going the way of the cartoonish crowd. If written words do not communicate, eye-catching graphics are not a viable alternative. However, I will concede some ground to painfully short attention spans--but not much ground. My hope is that the people who stumble into this corner of the cloud will take the issues of life, truth and reality seriously.

There is a polemical undergirding here. I do aim to be conversational. What is interesting is that a conversation is originally an effort by one person to "convert" another person to a new (and hopefully better) way of thinking about life, truth, and reality.