Because we live in a world of infinite possibilities, people often disagree when addressing important moral and ethical issues. For some questions, there just doesn’t seem to be a right or wrong answer. And in some situations, there seems to be several right answers.
Life isn’t black and white. It’s a million gray areas, don’t you find?–Ridley Scott
So what about the grey areas in our lives? Well, I’m a writer, so the grey areas are a favorite theme of mine, but those themes are always set against an absolute truth.
This interest occurred years ago, when I was an Art major at Spring Hill College. I learned about the shadowing color Grey–not only as it appears in Art, but in life.So as a writer, I see it this way: In my characters–and in life itself– there are always two extreme actions: Good and Evil. To ignore them in Fiction is to ignore Truth. Think of two ends of a horizontal line. At one end is the bright white of absolute Good. At the other end is the darkness of absolute Evil. In between those ends are lighter and darker hues of the color of GREY. (You might call these areas of relativism.) The farther we travel from either end, it becomes more difficult to see, or find our way back to the other.
The fact is most human beings travel daily along a line like this. They travel toward one end or the other, to the light of truth, or to the frequent darkness of a stubborn relativism. But in between the two ends is a lot of area in which to turn in an opposite direction—–either a fall, or an epiphany.
This is core for a writer of Catholic Fiction—the possibility of spiritual epiphany with a turn to TRUTH is always present in the work, though it may not always be accomplished by a character. The difference between creating a story and real life is that the fiction writer is pretty much in control.
But in our regular everyday lives, possibilities and the choices those possibilities present can be puzzling. This is why an informed conscience is necessary. And this is why we have to look for absolute truths, not relative truths, to guide us.
From gotquestions.org: Why is it so important to understand and embrace the concept of absolute truth in all areas of life (including faith and religion)? Simply because life has consequences for being wrong. Giving someone the wrong amount of a medication can kill them; having an investment manager make the wrong monetary decisions can impoverish a family; boarding the wrong plane will take you where you do not wish to go; and dealing with an unfaithful marriage partner can result in the destruction of a family and, potentially, disease.
As Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias puts it, “The fact is, the truth matters – especially when you’re on the receiving end of a lie.” And nowhere is this more important than in the area of faith and religion. Here on Earth, we can’t afford to ‘just get by.’ We want to form a conscience that perceives genuine truth and use it to guide us. Because eternity is an awfully long time to be wrong.
Read more: http://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-truth.html#ixzz3LDQFnNcm
Translating a World on the Edge 