*What Is Truth

The confusion comes from not using the plural.  That is, this particular confusion.  Ironically there's a precise counterpart of the confusion, where plurals are used, when it should be singular.  He and She, not Them.  But that first confusion? -- what is a woman?  When we make it plural, it's clear and easy. 

What are women?  Women are the people out of whose uteruses every human being has emerged.  

But this of course brings up another confusion, in its incompleteness.  Not every human being emerges from a uterus.  Or perhaps I mean not every human emerges alive.  Partial birth abortion is a murky area.  Murky yet clear.  It's certainly an abortion -- given that the word abort simply means to stop the process of something -- and all of life is a process.  All death is an abortion.  

It must be the "partial birth" part that's confusing.  How much of the baby has emerged, has been born, as an uncompleted process, before this particular medical procedure is performed (bravo!).  Is it dismembered piecemeal, as it emerges, like slicing bread?  A question for another time.  

(Why is a baby called "it", rather than "they"?  Is it something like the "of" or "-ed" that makes the difference between people/person of color, and colored people/person?)

To be fair we at least have to ask, if it's dead -- this partially-born aborted fetus -- is it human.  Dinosaur bones are not dinosaurs.  Mummified cats in Egyptian tombs are not cats.  Living things must exhibit some sort of behavior.  Mere existence-as-matter doesn't rise to the level of Being.  

I Am That I Am.  God being.  Human being.  Baby being.  Fetus being.  

Not all women produce humans.  Not all women can produce humans.  But everyone who has produced a human is a woman.  Everyone who has been produced was produced by a woman.

I've been thinking a fair bit in the past few years about maturity.  As in, stubbornness comes from immaturity.  Stubbornness and determination are similar, but determination is more than the assertion of will -- it arises from rationality and character.  Maturity might start with empathy, but that's only a start, not maturity itself.  It's an understanding of the world as it is, with its social dangers: you will be judged by the impression you make.  Maturity calculates and understands that this matters. 

I have been too interested in what I supposed was integrity -- being authentic -- and disregarded the fact that the normal civilities exist not as mere rote, but as one of the very highest necessity of all human cultures.  Conformity to expected norms is a good thing.  It's the foundation of stability.  Once we are secure, we can grow.  

You may have misunderstood my usage of conformity.  It's a matter of unthoughtful, or enlightened.  I'm coming to accept this latest generational fad, of tattoos.  It will always be the stupidest fad, so far.  Permanent.  Mullets and bellbottoms and raccoon coats were stupid. But young people are immature, and it's their job to explore, and then settle into the conformity of non-destructive habit.  Tattoos are not destructive.  Just defacing.

So what is a woman?  The fact that there are shades of gray -- hermaphrodites, intersex -- has no bearing on the fact that there is black and white.  Meaningful terms can be objectively defined.  

Black is an achromatic color resulting from the absence or absorption of visible light.  The fact, that there might be some smaller number of photons that are present, is a quibble.  Even the absolute of black can be a phenomenological relativity.   But, like obscenity, we know it when we see it.

Likewise, white light is what the human eye sees when all wavelengths of the visible spectrum combine.  The fact that there are human eyes that might see things differently, due to mental illness, brain injury, eye-damage, etc -- this would be analogous to hermaphroditism, a rare anomaly of mutation or dysfunction.  As with abortion, we do not decide general practice based on rare exceptions. 

That there is variety has no bearing on the existence of absolute truth.  That people do not agree does not mean that truth does not exist. 

Simple.  Maturity starts by defining its terms.  It starts with clarity.  It starts when sperm joins with egg.  It is an abortable process, moving more and more into what it actually is -- like black, even with many photons -- like white, with a spectrum that is not perfectly and equally distributed.  We should know it, maturity, like black and white, when we see it.  

I tipped it in the title.  Pilate's well-worn question to Jesus.  What is truth.  It can mean so many things.  That is, the question can be taken in different ways.  If it's not meaningfully defined, it is merely evocative, the ground for poetry, not information.  

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.  This is not a new idea.  Woe unto them that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.

Now it's not men taking the woman's penetrative role -- this antedates Sodom, probably to the, say, third generation after Adam.  Now it's men claiming they are women, and women, likewise.  Now it's an asserted cultural norm that whatever truth is, "non-binary" is true.  We are enjoying the blindness, then, the absence of light, that the citizens of the city of Sodom enjoyed after pounding on Lot's door.  

That should have been the title of this.  "America, Pounding on Lot's Door".  Let us in, that we may know them.  When there is no truth, we can know nothing at all.

J