Intuition of Truth

When Friday was talking with Captain about how bad ways of understanding life become common acceptance, a lot of things ran through my mind.  The first, I'll admit, made me feel like the bad guy because my initial thought was, if she's arguing that people believe what they do blindly because that is simply what their parents and society has taught them, does she ever question her own beliefs?  After all, she was taught her lifestyle and worldly view by someone else.  It wasn't a stance that she came to on her own.  I wondered if, based on her own argument, that fact ever made her ask the question, "is what I believe really the truth?"  But how are we to answer such a question in an age when truth has now become subjective? 

I've often asked this question of myself when it came to my own faith in Christianity.  I've wondered if I simply believe what I do because it has been engrained into to my thought process since birth, and if the story is the same for one of my Muslim or Hindu friends.  If this proposition is correct, then what is the source of truth?  Can something as absolute as truth truely be subjective?  In some instances Friday seems to suggest that it is, such as when she tries to get the Captain to see that just because he deams the pen as a pen doesn't necessarily mean that is its function for everyone.  However, she adamantly proclaims her worldview as truth because there is something inside of her that tells her it is.  She uses that same intuition with the Captain when she asks him if he innately knows that drinking as he did was wrong.

I feel the same about my faith.  I read a book last year called "Blue Like Jazz" (which I highly recommend to anyone), and in it there's a chapter named "Penguin Sex".  Yep, penguin sex.  In it the author, Donald Miller, describes how mother penguins leave their eggs behind for months, and somehow, depsite being miles out in the ocean, they always come back in the week, if not the day, their baby hatches.  How is such a thing possible?  So far, it's not, scientifically speaking.  Miller describes the phenomenon as the mother penguin "just knowing", and that is enough explanation for him because it is how he now views his faith.  After years of struggling with his faith for academic reasons and questions of conditioning through his childhood, he now separates all of it and says he just knows.