"Do you ever wonder why we're doing this?" she blurted out bluntly. "Why we're fighting this evil, putting ourselves through this terrible pain...why?"
"Because it's our destiny to fight for a cause that will fail...I've told you," Melanthe said calmly and immediately.
"That's not true," Kira argued fiercely. "We're doing this to save the world from evil! We can succeed, and you know it."
Aidan snorted. "No, I think Melanthe's right. There is no such thing as evil, though."
"What do you mean?" Hope inquired.
"Evil will always prevail," Melanthe added in before he could answer. "It's fruitless to think otherwise."
"I mean that humans created good and evil," Aidan continued. "Don't you get it, Hope? Before humanity existed...there was no debating about good or evil. There only was. Humans created good and evil, the same way they created language or methods of telling time."
"That's...stupid," Kira blurted out.
"Define 'virtue,' then, Kira," Aidan asked her, a triumphant blaze already illuminating his deep brown eyes. "Go on. Define it."
"Virtues cannot be defined," she said surely, as if she had already thought this out. "They are beyond the sphere of humanity..."
"Aidan's right, though...you can't prove that," Hope thought aloud. Aidan smirked.
"Virtues are a mark of absolute truth," Melanthe explained, "and absolute truth does not exist. Everyone has their own truths...if there was a universal set, there wouldn't be problems like this evil in the world."
"Evil doesn't exist," said Aidan, annoyed. Everyone ignored this thought for now.
"By saying that absolute truths absolutely do not exist, you are contradicting yourself," Kira smiled.
"Not so. There are infinite absolute truths. Each person has his or her own absolute truths...don't you see? All of them are correct...because reality is all in our heads." Melanthe looked content with this argument.
"Everyone may have their own ideas of which truths are absolute...but one of those truths is right," Kira said.
"What if Melanthe's is correct, then? What if the truly absolute truth is the one that says that all of them - and none of them - are correct?" Aidan stood up for her.
"That's a weird thought," Hope said. "And, basically, this absolute truth discussion is just going around in circles. If there are absolute truths, then the truth could still be that there are no truly absolute truths. If there aren't, the truth could be anything, and again, there are absolutely no absolute truths. Nothing is solved by these methods."
"Except that of those two ways, there are both absolute truths and no absolute truths at the same time," Aidan said thoughtfully.
"Except that that makes no sense," Kira argued zealously. "How can two opposites exist at the same time, and both be true?"
"Only if there is no truth, and both are correct," Melanthe said, almost indulgently.
"There must be some way that two opposites can exist at once," muttered Hope to herself. "In fact, they do all the time...one person's fortune is another's misfortune."
"Yes, but only one of them is correct," Kira said impatiently.
"Only if you believe in absolute truth," Aidan pointed out.
"And if you don't believe in absolute truth, then my way is correct, because every way is correct. So there are absolute truths," Kira said stubbornly.
"And if there are absolute truths, and so my belief is completely wrong, then your argument is invalid because you used my belief to attain yours." Aidan looked content.
Hope's head was spinning. Everything everyone was saying made perfect sense, and yet, somehow, none of it made sense. If it all made sense, she thought, then there weren't absolute truths; but if there weren't absolute truths, then there were absolute truths, but if there were absolute truths...
Hope shook out her hair. She had never delved so deep into philosophy before, and she realized that this discussion was going nowhere. One assumption would lead to a circle of assumptions that cancelled each other out. She had a quick thought of an impossible geometry problem: "If a statement is true, then it is not true. If a statement is not true, then it is true..."
"...my religion exists," Kira was explaining as Hope snapped back to the conversation.
"All religions are created systems," Aidan argued.
"No it's not!"
"You can't prove they exists"
"You can't prove they don't."
"If you assume that your religion exists," Melanthe interjected, "you have deceived yourself. You believe your religion ceaselessly because it tells you to, but if it was not true in the first place..."
"Yes, but - "
"And so you must look at things objectively. Every religion has the same system, don't you know? And yet you only believe yours, because it tells you to. If you believe it exists, it will lead you deeper down into a spiral, and you will not be able to see it any other way..."
"Yes, but - "
"It's a cycle, you see? If you don't believe religion, you see it my way; if you believe religion, you see it your way. You can either choose religion exists, or you can not choose...but this, too, leads into a smaller circle embedded in the larger one of absolute truth."
Kira didn't seem to know what to say. Neither did Hope; she herself followed her religion, but was it blind following? Did she only find reasons to follow it because she was looking for them?
"I believe in God and my religion, no matter what you say," Kira finally said quietly. "My faith overcomes everything that you say..."
Melanthe simply shook her head and grinned, as if her point was further proven; Kira looked on determinedly as if her point was further proven, and Hope realized that these were indeed circles. Each belief would explain "problems" with the other that further fueled them, leading the believer back to the starting point eventually and with even more decisiveness. And which was true? It was impossible to say, because no one knew the absolute truths of the universe. Or were both true? Were there absolute truths? If there were -
Hope stopped her thinking abruptly. Truly, these were scary thoughts. She could get lost in these circles of logic forever, thinking and thinking, and never find a way out. The more she looked at them, the more complex they became. The only thing that made sense was that nothing made sense...