Note that long-sighted people cannot only see things far away, but also things close to them - just with less focus. In fact their field of vision is just the same as anyone’s, only clarity increases with distance and decreases with proximity - a sliding scale.
Thereby, I am not at all making truth into a “distanced unchanging thing, divorced from the reality”, I am instead saying that truth increases with distance away from reality - it is present throughout to a variable extent, but never separated from it: fields of vision are all of reality, and far-away reality is still reality. I am exactly saying that “senses” don’t lie, and yes, when we want to “make sense” - that is what distorts.
In line with the sliding scale of truth, I am also not at all proposing some kind of higher “Truth” with a capital T. I am instead being modest, just as you suggested one ought to be.
You appear to have got a completely wrong impression of what I was trying to say, I can only apologise if I explained it so badly that you interpreted my words in the way you did. So I’m sorry pilgrim-seeker_tom, I think you’ve been wowed by a strawman, but at least his words make a reasonable point in themselves, even if they don’t apply to what I’m saying. The only thing I can find to respond to in other things you’ve said is:
Commonly suggested as supporting evidence for God-belief, that “it’s natural” - many natural things are accidental results of other natural things that serve obvious purpose. One thing that emerged as a “play-it-safe” approach has been “abductive reasoning”: is it a sufficient explanation that a dangerous thing caused what I just experienced? Those who stick around to deductively find out fall foul to the dangerous thing if that’s what it was afterall, and those who assume and evade what might have just been nothing stay healthy. This has been slowly undoing itself as we consolidate and expand our position on top of the food chain and in charge of our surroundings, and deductive reasoning is slowly phasing out abductive reasoning as the more useful and now anti-dangerous approach - and unsurprisingly, God-belief is weakening in line with this. However, the reason it is slow is that abductive reasoning is still relatively useful, and it has accidentally resulted in some other useful behaviours. It is evidently proven over and over again that co-operative strategies win versus individualist strategies, and this is selected for naturally by the advantages of looking out for your closest relations. If you support or even save a sibling, your genetic make-up gets passed down more and eclipses those only out for themselves - this will naturally emerge as a dominant behaviour. But how to get this kinship to extend to wider society who shares less genetic material for even more co-operative gains? Abductive reasoning posits that it didn’t initially know how the world could have come to be and why it would behave in the way it did. Since individual people don’t appear to have the power to cause many larger scale things, even though people are experienced as the most powerful causers around, it is sufficient to posit a greater kind of person that is powerful enough to cause these bigger things - ergo God. God belief brings people together in a way that transcends normal selection by co-operating only with those most related to you. Pseudo-kinship arises and co-operative behaviours spread much more effectively throughout a society - these behaviours out-perform others and effectively religious peoples come out on top. The fact that they rationally do so through the means of irrationally is irrelevant. This kind of success sadly still works very well, hence the slow emergence of more rational approaches. So we aren’t necessarily “hard wired” to act as though God exists, but people who are prone to do so under the right conditions still proliferate in modern society, even though they’re rationally more limited.
It took me a while to suss out such statements as “the truth is that there is no truth” and “that truth is relative is absolutely true”, but I believe my OP proposition encapsulates both. Absolute truth is in fact just the most true possible - it is another relative term like all others: “it is the most relatively true that all truth is relative” is perfectly fine. It’s binary thinkers who can’t cope with this, only able to think of absolutes as the binary opposite of relative - with the two incompatible. And of course with statements such as “the truth is that there is no truth”, they identify this as having the form of an absolute truth and being about absolute truths - either you can have absolute truths, or it’s not true and therefore false - and so it looks like a contradiction when one attempts to insert the obvious observation that some truths are more true than others, and no synthetic truths can ever be known to be absolutely true. If one doesn’t think analytic truths necessarily depend on synthetic truths (thus making them never absolutely knowable too), their clear and absolute rationalist world falls apart as soon as it is applied to anything at all. Just because something can be presented as absolute, and have internal consistency, doesn’t mean it can apply to the world - it is just another example of my OP proposition that truth is most clear the more distanced it is from reality.
The problem you’re encountering here is your conception of consciousness as “within oneself”. Commonly this is where it is assumed to be because a lot of the major sensory organs triangulate to some vague area inside the head… and yet nobody has ever “found it” inside a head. But regardless of “where” consciousness is, it is “of” much more than just that which is “within oneself” - and of course with this clarification, distance becomes perfectly possible.
With regard to how knowledge and truth are determined/established, it seems to me that the brain mylinates neural pathways more commonly when they are experienced in conjunction and it all becomes a relative issue of association. “This word” is known to denote “this experience”, because they come together so often, “this experience” is known to cause “that experience” because one follows the other all the time. Truth and knowledge are just this process but tested much more rigorously and exhaustively. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.
I have for a while now regarded truths as more similar to lies - but useful lies. Seeing as truths require distance from reality, they are necessarily not true to reality by at least some measures. Some truths are more true than others, but they are all forms of lies since they are distanced distortions of truth, and they are communicated by words, and words in themselves are not the things they denote. For various reasons, the intertwined nature of truth and deception ought to be the expectation, not a mysterious problem that binary thinkers cannot shake. My depiction of truth as long-sighted takes all of this into account.