I heard that GK Chesterton once said “If something is worth saying it’s worth exaggerating”. I love hyperbole, in fact I love it so much I’d like to marry it. So I’m about to do a little courting…

PRESIDENTS AND GODS

Have you heard the latest news? It seems that Trump, Cruz, Clinton and Sanders have all agreed to share the presidency! They’re all going to cozy-up in the Oval office and run the country together as one!

Impossible, you say? Ridiculous? It’s no more ridiculous-in fact less so-than the idea that all religions professed by man are worshiping the same god.

LUNKWISH

I heard a woman on the radio, in her cool sexy voice, say, “We just want to bring normalicy to their lives”. Normalicy? Is there such a word? I’ve heard “normalcy” in the US on many occasions: which one is correct, or are they both wrong, or right?

When I went to school in the dark ages the word was “normality”. Anyway, who cares? In this post-modern age why shouldn’t we just make up our own words, and our own smelling for those worms? Tooth is toe-dlly sabjacteev an-e-wa…tooth is wut u mak et! Sn mmwz gljterrrrrely blo wump.

If you can tell me the meaning of the previous sentence, I’ll give you a large sum of money.

It really doesn’t matter much whether we say “normalicy”, “normality”, “normalness” or “normalfulness”-though the examiner may have a different idea: we can interpret each other’s little mistakes and shortcomings. But when the concept, “What’s true for you is true, just so long as you’re sincere” is invoked, we need to start using some discernment and making some judgments. I could “sincerely” believe that I’m a five-legged green camel from Venus, but that doesn’t mean I am. You see, what we call ” truth” to suit our own imaginings may actually be nothing more than meaningless nonsense, like that sentence above.

TOOTH

Some things are factual, and some things aren’t. The same must surely apply in the spiritual realm. With so many vastly different beliefs, philosophies and isms in the world we must, if we’re at all honest with ourselves, say that they cannot all be true, and they can’t all be equally valid. All beliefs could be wrong, but not all can be true. There cannot be no god, one God, ten gods and a million gods simultaneously. And how would those million gods manage to get along, with so many wildly differing opinions on how the world should be run? It would be like putting Trump, Cruz, Clinton and Sanders all in the Oval office and expecting peace and harmony.

It’s for us to search out truth and to discard everything else, with the inclusion of what we once wished could be true but clearly isn’t. And no, we can’t shrug our shoulders and declare that it’s impossible to know the truth-not until we’ve spent a lifetime searching for it.

• APOLOGETICS