owever unintentionally (maybe), my parents-when done raising me-had raised an unrepentant postmodernist. For me, if the same object meant different things to different subjects (one's unclean beast is another's pork chops), then objects meant nothing in and of themselves, but assumed meaning only when subjects attributed meaning to them. Truth was, therefore, subjective; it existed only in the mind, and because different minds saw the same thing differently, objective truth was no more real than the ghost of King Lear's grandfather.

I once hammered this point home to a drunken British Army deserter as we argued about an empty beer bottle in a Stockholm apartment.

"Look," I said, pointing to hollow glass on the table between us. "When you look at that beer bottle, you're seeing something different than I am. You're seeing it from your own angle, which is different from mine. You're seeing it through your own eyes, which see differently than mine do. And whatever you see, you then filter it, interpret it, and emote about it through your own past experiences, which are different from mine. Though we're looking at the same object, how could we possibly see the same thing?"

My epistemological dogmatism was shattered, however, a year later in a Florida restaurant one night when, because of a pizza, I suddenly knew that objective truth had to exist. Looking at the meal, I realized that maybe someone believed aliens from the constellation Canis Minor dropped it out of a spaceship; or maybe some subject believed that the pizza arose out of a vicious evolutionary struggle for existence. Fifty people might have been so sure the god Marduk created the pizza that they would not only die, but kill, for this conviction. A million subjects might have held a million different beliefs about the pizza's origins, and maybe every one of them was wrong. But somewhere (even if no human could know where) an explanation about the origin and purpose of the pizza had to exist, and that explanation, whatever it was, was the truth about the pizza.

Then it hit me: just as the pizza had to have an explanation (and whatever that explanation was, it was the truth about the pizza), humanity, the world, and my existence also had to have an explanation (and that explanation, whatever it was, was the truth about the world).

I could hear the racket: 21 years of scaffolding and edifice crashing around me (a personal Copernican revolution is noisy). The epistemological center of gravity was wrenched away from me to a reality that existed outside my mind. Transcending the relativity, subjectivity, and contingency that hijack every human experience, objective reality-originating in something-had to exist. Which meant, then, that truth had to as well. Heresy had become orthodoxy over a pizza.

As I walked outside (the ground feeling harder than ever before) and erratic shadows confused the night, this thought burned inside me: If it were possible to know this truth about my origins, about my existence, then I wanted to know it no matter where it led me, what it cost me, what I had to suffer, what I had to give up. If I could ever know it, I wanted to know it-no matter what.

And all I know is this: Two years later, of all the different ways I could have gone, all the different paths I could have taken, I (who hated Christians and vegetarians) ended up becoming, of all things, a Seventh-day Adventist.

Since then I've met those who've said their desire for truth led them away from the Adventist Church; or that in their quest for truth they found Islam, or Buddhism, or atheism. Fine-but all these testimonies mean nothing to me personally, because I don't know their hearts and don't have to answer for them. The only one I know, and have to answer for, is my own; and in its painful desire for truth, no matter the cost (which turned out to be, at the time, expensive), I was thrust into the Adventist Church, and nowhere else.

And that's the absolute truth.

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.