Tok Essay Plan:
"Truth is what the community ultimately settles down"
Charles Peirce

Starting on a larger scale, many believe that the existence of the human race is driven only by the desire to get to the "Ultimate Truth" - what truth really is.

The “Truth” itself is a very ambigous concept – different people perceive various situations in their own unique way and thus interpret and describe incidents differently. This affects the “definition” of truth as what is true for one person may not entirely be true for everyone.

The sense of justice is heavily influenced by what everyone believes to be the “truth”. For example, militants fighting for Kashmiri independence are veiwed as terrorists by the rest of India, but as heroes and matrys by most Kashmiris. Indian independence fighters were labelled terrorists by the British but were heroes for the rest of India. The British call the First War of Independence (1857) the Sepoy Revolt. What really is true?

Unconsciously, everyone searches for their inner truth, what they are headed towards. And this is where the community comes in. every culture, every community, has a differnet way of getting to that truth. I believe that the main pathway to get to the truth, for every culture, is religion. Each religion is only a different path to get to that light at the end, what people call Nirvana or Salvation.

As we talk about religion, the question of God arises. What is God? A concpet created so that people have something to hang on to when everything seems hopeless? Is God another name for the Ultimate Truth?

There is enough proof to suggest that the people of the world, collectively, have not really settled down to what the truth is. People used to belive that the earth was flat; it turned out to be round centuries later. People also belived that the earth was the centre of the solar system, with all the planets, the sun and moon revolving around it. They believed this theory for quite some time, in other words, they “settled down” to the belief.

But it was not the truth.

We now believe that the sun is the centre of our solar system. But is that really the “truth”?

Therefore, what a community settles down to believing may be the truth for that particular community but not the “real truth” that exists.