Anthony asks:

> What does one seek for in one's "search for truth"?
> Salvation? The Nature of God? The Secrets of the Universe?
> Why Life? Why _Me_? A Reason to live?
> 
> A truism: the seeker of truth seeks answers.
> But to what questions?
> No one but the uninformed would assert,
> There is no "truth"-- I speak the truth
> when I say I'm wearing cotton gym shorts right now.
> It is the truth that gravity
> is the force behind planetary motion.
> It is the truth that the speed of light is a constant.
> It is the truth you and I will die, ultimately.
> 
> Yet it is the truth some seek a deity from fear of damnation.
> Some seek a deity for a center to their lives.
> Some find a deity a convenient sociological construct.
> Some find no need for a deity at all. And happily.

I have no answers to these questions, and if I did,
it would be presumptuous of me to offer such answers
of my own in a discussion that purports to center
on the philosophy of Kierkegaard who has so much to say
on the topics in issue.

It is helpful, I think, to remind ourselves that Kierkegaard
identified truth with subjectivity, with inwardness and the
with the pathos that is the hallmark of subjectivity,
and that Kierkegaard explicitly declared objectivity
to be falsehood. 

To the extent that they are themselves replete with incongruity
and paradox, Kierkegaard's criteria cannot be claimed to answer
Anthony's questions; but they do provide a constructive and, in
my judgment, inordinately productive framework for thinking about
Anthony's questions dialectically. Indeed, the transformation of
our experience which critical, dialectic thought is capable of
inducing may be the only answer to Anthony's questions that we
will ever be able to find.

The cotton gym shorts, the planetary motion, and the speed of light
which Anthony cites as "truths" are objective and do not qualify
as truth in the sense of Kierkegaard. Neither do the other commodities
with which we clothe and feed ourselves, in the production and
commerces of which we which we spend our lives and earn our
livelihood. Similarly proscribed are the constants, the magic
numbers of physics, the atomic and celestial dimensions that are
the pride of modern science. These too are falsehoods to the extent
that they purport to be objective.  Even the laws of physics and
the certainties of mathematics fall by the wayside of Kierkegaard's
demonic pilgrimage toward the divine.

Similarly, the considerations of how why or whether others
seek deity. Truth is subjectivity. Subjectivity is the passion
of the _individual_, and as such is unconcerned and unaffected by
concurrence or contradiction of "others". And it makes no
difference how the passion of the individual, the subjective
passion, is denominated, whether as the search for "truth",
for "God", or for any of the other grounds of existence,
for they are but names for, and expressions of, the same
subjective experience. That is what I understand Kierkegaard
to say.

Kierkegaard's vision of truth is radical and revolutionary
as is the Christianity of the New Testament with which it
wrestles.  It flies in the face of the social, political
and scientific realities of the contemporary world. Coming
to terms with the truth that Kierkegaard has discovered,
is, I believe, the work of a lifetime.  "et beatus est,
quicumque non fuerit scandalizatus in me." "... blessed
is he whosoever shall not be offended in me." (Luke 7,23)