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truth has a small "t"

Looking back, my tracks have come this long way through religion, not exactly from this old Norwegian Stave Kirche, but something more like this one, below, on the island where our father was born.  
Precisely that one.
I have been there.

 King Olav Tryggvason built a wooden church there in the year 998, when Christianity was introduced to Norway, and Norway said "How are things going?".

 Later, King Olaf II convened at Moster, declaring that Norway was converting to Christianity.  The current building, pictured, was probably built on the original church site in about 1150.  

 That sealed my fate.  We started with Nordic myths and gods, hitched our wagons to Christianity, and became Lutherans about 500 years ago.  

 A lot of my relatives are buried there.  A cousin, showing me the church and grounds, pointed to a headstone with a round hole in it, saying he thought it was a marker for an unbeliever, affording parishioners a chance to spit through the stone, to show their contempt and great faith.  
I thought it best not to try to explain myself in halting Norwegian, lest someone bore a hole through me.  

 It is not really Norway, or my own drafty headstone I have in mind:  it is how we know what we know.

 Religions of the sort I was born into, are patriarchal, and authoritarian.  We had a pretty good idea of what the truth was:  the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.  One way of understanding the Reformation that made Christians into Catholics on one side, and Protestants on the other, was a dispute about how we got at that truth.  One side tended to affirm that the Bishops of the church guarded the truth, and the other side became book-centered:  the Bible.  Today, that once-clearer distinction has become muddy.  In either case, God was Truth, and revealed the Way and the Truth and the Life to us.  

 It was patriarchal family blown large.
It was monarchy blown large.
It still is.  
God is male, so is Jesus.
So were his disciples, and priests.
Men were the head of the family.
God was King.  We were servants of the King.
Apparently the King was caucasian, too.

 It is rumored that there still are people who want a Strong Man to lead us,
to tell us what to do, to take messy matters into his own hands and make us great again.  I suppose it is something like saying, "It says in the Good Book. . . ."

 Well, ask people what their final, absolute authority is.  
They will probably not say, "The Constitution!"
They will probably not say, "We are, together!"
If push comes to shove. . . .

 The genius and the glory of science is that ideas are something less than absolute:  they are just the best we know.  And everyone knows that better ideas will emerge from testing what we know against what we are continuing to learn.  truth has a small "t".  

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