Trapped in negativity
More than 2000 years ago, one of the people of Crete, Epimenides, a poet and seer from their own people, said “Cretans are always liars…” The Apostle Paul, some hundreds of years later said, “this testimony is true”. I’m sure Paul found this amusing; I do. If Epimenides' statement is true, it follows his statement is false! So Cretans are not liars, so it is true that Cretans are always liars, and round and round we spin, trapped in a kind of logical whirlpool. This famous self contradiction is called the Liar Paradox and has been studied much over the centuries.
Here is the core example of the Liar Paradox:
This sentence is false.
... Does this flummox you? It ought to! It is neither true nor false but a third, self-contradictory class.
Some of you will know Jourdain’s Paradox which is a more complex example of this, dating from more than 100 years ago. Take a piece of unused card; write on one side “The statement on the other side of this card is true” and on the other side “The statement on the other side of this card is false”. If you take one of these statements as true, you will never get out of this second logical whirlpool. Try it!
We are all in this trap. If I confess “I am a liar” (and can you say otherwise?) I am similarly trapped in a circular logical prison cell. The lesson from this and other similar puzzling tricks is that referring negatively to yourself even if true, leads to difficulties, indeed into traps. But to some extent all of us have to say that.
If I say, “This sentence is true”, I am not trapped. It is true and non-contradictory. The lesson is that truth in the universe is positive, not self contradictory. If I even say, as some religions do, “I am an illusion” - another negative statement - I need a life-buoy to rescue me from the logical whirlpool!
If I say “I am truthful”, for most of us it could be true most of the time, but all of us carry some shadow of duplicity, and contradiction.
Paul gives a quite profound way to get out of the trap. He was not a Cretan. He was outside the circular trap, and able to judge correctly that Cretans were indeed liars. Sometimes you need someone outside your circular prison cell not only to judge you, but turn the key and let you out. Do you have a suitable judge? That Judge would have to be Truth itself. A truth which says “I am the truth”, not which says, “I am not”.
There is one man in history who was constantly saying “Truly, truly, I say to you...” Jesus of Nazareth. He is either true or the most profound liar in history.
What is he truly, truly saying to you?