Truth and Facts

Is a fact truth? I’ve been pondering that a lot for the past several weeks.
Our minister seeded that thought in my mind on Easter Sunday. Unitarian Easter services often revolve around re-birth, the coming of spring and renewal. He chose to talk about Wanda the Fish, who’d died but came back to life as she was about to be buried. He told the children the story of Jesus, who’d not been a popular person with the authorities, had been tried and sentenced to death by them, and then born again. Each, an allegory about being born again.
Every culture has stories of rebirth. But was the story of Jesus’ resurrection just that, a story? Or was it a fact?
A few weeks ago I posted a message on my Facebook account about a Christian church group picketing outside a high school with signs that read, “God hates fags.” That sparked a lot of debate from friends and family weighing in on the issue. Many quoted the Bible and that popular phrase about men lying down with men. A few sent me messages about the inconsistencies within the Bible and “how can people believe in a faith where one minute you should take an eye for an eye and in the next, commit a mortal sin if you murder someone?”. Some wrote that God hates the sin but loves the sinner. Others wrote that the church doing the picketing isn’t really a Christian church despite those members’ claims. Quite a few of my Unitarian friends just nod their heads and tell me it’s hard for them to be tolerant of such intolerance of others. Communion is flesh transmogrified, but no, it’s just symbolic
So what is the truth here? How can so many people have such different views about this and so many other volatile subjects? And why would anyone rely upon a book written 2000 years ago to justify wars and killing and hate towards others? How can people I know be so unremittingly sure of themselves about something that’s contrary to what millions of other people believe?
I think, like the allegory of Jesus’ birth and death and resurrection, it’s a matter of truth versus fact. For some reason known only to them, the religions they’ve chosen meet their needs. If it didn’t, they search for something else to meet those needs. That search might or might not lead them to their own or another religion. They may have to re-think the way they think about beliefs.
Burt Keller, a Congregational minister, once told me that people have their beliefs and they swim along quite happily until something comes along to jostle that belief. It could be a war, or someone’s death, an illness or a natural disaster. And once shaken, they’re never quite the same again. Their faith may be stronger, or it may weaken. They may look around at the diverse world we live in and wonder how so many faiths others than theirs can be wrong. And once they’ve thought about that, perhaps they will be able to see their beliefs as not a literal fact, with only one person’s interpretation, but perhaps, just for a moment, they may be able to see a message. Not a fact. But a truth.