There is an old saying, which is as certain in its meaning as it is uncertain in its origins: “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Destruction is preceded by delusion. This idea, which is rooted in the thought of antiquity, also has a parallel in the mysterious words of St. Paul:
The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder, and with every wicked deception directed against those who are perishing, because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them. For this reason God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness. (2 Thess 2:9-12)
Recently I read about a college professor who has just begun his virtual semester teaching Mandarin. Like all languages, their inherent properties mean that they favor “filler” sounds and words which usually help a speaker develop his thought or otherwise fills the empty space in a dialogue. We English speakers often make sounds like “um” or use words such as “like” in this manner. This professor was fired because a certain Mandarin “filler” sounds like a racial slur in English. He was put on leave for this, even though he wasn’t really using a racial slur.
Another story comes to mind in this vein, when a Dominican friar once reported going to a University to teach and was falsely reported by a student, due to the appearance of his religious habit, to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Thankfully, people were able to shame the man accusing the poor Priest out of his ignorance, but such is the attitude which is growing like a malignant cancer throughout the world, a toxic union of ignorance and rash judgment. Some have said that this is a societal amplification of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the idea that a person’s arrogance is typically correlated to his ignorance. As Socrates reminded us, the root of wisdom, let alone true knowledge, is having at least the willingness to accept that one does not know far more than one does know. Humility is not only the foundation of knowledge, but also of love.
These anecdotes and tendencies can be summed up in a one-line thesis. So much of the collapse in modern civility I believe can be understood as a pursuit of facts without truth, or of “truths” without facts.
Some good people would probably interject that the problem is that people are forgetting how to really love each other, but that is simply a different angle of looking at the same problem. If knowledge is the acquiring of facts, wisdom is the union of knowledge with love. Even brute facts, without the moderating and correcting presence of context, can become extremely misleading, both in the sciences and in relationships.
Let’s start with the pursuit of facts without truth. Journalism at its finest and most authentic happens when reporters seek to bring the full truth of a situation to light. Many reporters in various parts of the world put their lives and livelihood at risk in order to perform this crucial service in the service of liberty and humanity, because the truth does not only set us free morally and religiously, but also politically. Journalism becomes corrupted and perverted when it deviates from the basic goal of the search and delivery of the truth to people. This perversion has become so disturbing that many of our major news outlets, especially in light of the rioting of recent months, have the gall to report the massive destruction of property as “mostly peaceful” even as the cameras, our surrogate eyes, show us city blocks up in flames. I take comfort in the power of comedy and satire to call these borderline ‘Sovietical’ excuses for journalism exactly what they are: lies.
A concurrent feature of this pursuing of facts without truth is also the promulgation of “truths” without facts. For instance, the “truth” that there are no real differences between biological men and women, as ontologically, scientifically, and grammatically absurd as that statement is. “Fact checkers” used to provide a very helpful service to the average person when they looked for a quote, an assertion’s source, or original context in order to help us to understand the reality of a situation. It seems to me that most “fact checkers”, even the once-blameless Snopes, are now “truth checkers”, looking to see if a person is asserting what is in conformity with the standard orthodoxy.
Classical liberals used to laugh at ancient and medieval people because they had a very strong aversion to what they (and I) called heretical thinking, or heterodoxy. They used to say that things such as censorship and the Index of Forbidden Books were totally of the past. Education and a ‘scientific mindset’ would set us free from these parochial, tribalistic ways of thinking. But ancient and medieval people understood that heretical thinking, which doesn’t just mean errors on purely theological matters, can cause the collapse of civilization. Fallacious reasoning, when it reaches a critical mass, becomes a mass delusion. Some people may counter this assertion by saying that religious thinking is simply one mass delusion among thousands which have at one time or another gripped our collective psyches. Yet, only a person with a facile grasp of theology or religion can possibly assert that, because many world religions have a metaphysical vision which is based on centuries or millennia of accumulated experience of humanity, let alone the content of divine revelation.
Noam Chomsky, while no friend to traditional religion, noted in his book Manufacturing Consent that industrialized, modern mass media is in its essence the same as a priestly caste for a pre-scientific culture. In the past, it was the priestly caste that was considered educated or holy enough to interpret the natural and supernatural worlds, and to ‘divine’ meaning from world events and human behavior. Only they could read the entrails of sheep, the flights of birds, or the appearance of comets, and tell king and peasant alike their significance.
While we live in a so-called ‘scientific’ era, we have never left behind as human beings the desire for authentic interpretation of the meaning of things. But, presently, it seems that most people, at least in practice, view journalists and the news media as the current interpretive caste. In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary added the word “post-truth” to the vocabulary of the English language, ostensibly in reaction to the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. But Trump is only a symptom, not the disease. It strikes me as disingenuous to claim that Trump is a liar, crass and hypocritical, when so much of our ruling class manifest the exact same pathologies. We are a culture that loves the untrue, the banal, and the self-contradictory. Should we be surprised if then our leaders come from the same stock? Even in the context of Trump, I still think Peter Thiel put it best: Trump’s supporters take him seriously, not literally, while his adversaries take him literally, but not seriously. This manifests another aspect to the truth/fact problem: even if a person speaks the truth today, and even if he has the facts to support it, the problem of credibility is now at the forefront of our malaise.
Once, like Fox Mulder in the American series The X–Files, we as a society always believed that “the truth was out there.” But now, because of the collapse in credibility, the average person is experiencing one of two things: an epistemological nihilism, where we become incapable of believing anything we see or hear, or epistemological ghettoization, where different segments of the population diverge and differ according to their own standards of credibility, leading to whole groups of people formed according to competing cultural ‘magisteria’: for instance, people who preferentially watch FOX, CNN, or the BBC for their information about the world.
Pope Benedict XVI, with his typical perspicacity, foresaw this in his now-famous 2006 Regensburg Address. Although most of the Western media could only hyperfocus on the remarks on Islam and violence (which, ironically, led to eruptions of Islamic violence around the world), the more important point he made was taken from the Platonic dialogue Phaedo, where he foresaw the tragic results of a world which largely suspends its ongoing search for truth. His remarks bear quoting in full:
Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: ‘It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss’. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.
In other words, continued exposure to lies, both psychologically and morally, leads to exasperation and despair. Benedict viewed the University as playing a crucial role in forming students in a love for the truth, in the broadest senses of the word. He identified, like many cultural critics have, that the University is at the core of the decay in the modern discourse, with its corruption of language and thought. We Catholics especially have an epochal responsibility to uphold and/or rebuild the edifice of education which is one of the glories and foundations of Western Civilization.
As is now once again made clear from current events, what starts as a mere idea has effects in common life. “Post-Truth” may have been coined by Oxford academics after the election of Trump, but many of those same academics for decades had mocked the idea of truth entirely. The sons of the revolution, once again, are being devoured by the guillotine. And like most out-of-control revolutions, the establishment is now setting up “Committees of Public Safety” whose purpose is to police thought and punish dissent in the name of upholding the commonweal. One need only look at the invasive and aggressive interventions of Facebook, Google, and Twitter in their crusade to squelch postmodern heresy.
My final observation is one on the personal price of this civilizational crisis. The divorce of facts from truth and truth from facts, is at the root of so much modern witch hunting, as evidentiary standards are lowered to the point of non-existence in order to justify institutionalized slander. When facts cannot uphold the standard orthodoxy, the facts must be doctored to uphold it. This happened, as I have said many times, with priests, and we were just the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Nick Sandmann, the youth who was defamed by the media simply for the crime of being a conservative who chose silence over screaming confrontation, won his defamation suit (or rather, arrived at a settlement out of court) against CNN and other news outlets. That poor young man suffered greatly because of a casual disregard for the truth. Now, we are exposed to the tears and grief of mothers of dead children, and owners of burned businesses, who are trivialized and demeaned by a ruling establishment that does not want to take the truth of the Marxist roots of the violence seriously.
Speaking the truth, as many writers have said, is a rebellious and subversive act in an empire of lies. There is a difference, however, between speaking an untruth and speaking a lie. As Thomas Aquinas defined a lie as an untruth affirmed with an intention to deceive, we cannot ignore the power of human malice in the ascendancy of lies over truth. As St. Paul said, the greatest delusion of all to come, that of the Great Apostasy and the Antichrist, will come upon a people who not only tell untruths, but actively and maliciously will their dissemination. They become, as the psychologist Scott Peck famously called them, “the people of the lie”.
That same Mystery of Iniquity is active in these times, and will continue until the arrival of Christ, who will destroy the Great Deceiver, and all deceit, with the “sword that proceeds from his mouth.” That sword is a symbol for the truth. Yet it would be a mistake to think that the responsibility for the destruction of deceit lies solely in the hands of the one who is Truth Incarnate. That same sword of truth can be found in the minds and mouths of all people of good will, who commit themselves to proclaiming it, come what may, in whatever time or place they find themselves.
(Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Scrutum et Lorica site in a slightly different form.)
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We read: “In other words, continued exposure to lies, both psychologically and morally, leads to exasperation and despair.”
And even worse: The brain can learn to protect itself by chemically exchanging ever-larger lies for the truth–perhaps helping to explain a younger generation with more than its share of bubble-world infantiles in need of university safe-spaces and trigger warnings…
A recent study completed at University College London and using MRI technology (magnetic resonance imagery) strongly implies that a habit of lying tends to suppress the part of the brain (the amygdala) that responds emotionally to a “slippery slope” pattern of small and then larger lies (Neil Garrett, Dan Ariely and Stephanie Laxxaro, Nature Neuroscience Journal, October 24, 2016; reported by Erica Goode, New York Times, October 25, 2016).
I always heard it as “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first call ‘promising.'” The burden of a great potential.
Our American culture, in its hyperness to ‘get things done’ or ‘issue resolved’ will believe the bended truth in order to obtain an explanation – even if it’s totally wrong or unfair. We know this is done in the criminal system and we know people want someone to blame for a situation, which is easy to see in our hyper incarceration industry – ‘who dun it?!’
In families it is evident from young children being blamed by their parents for something they did not do, to teachers in the classroom and employers. (We won’t even get into families laying blame on siblings caring for elderly parents.)
It’s not surprising it transcends into the media; it’s obvious in politics.
Mystery of iniquity is also translated as mystery of lawlessness, to wit evil. Sin. “For in the course of the mystery of lawlessness (2 Thes 2:7), false prophetism, after it ceases in the Thessalonian community, will be manifested in the world at large (2 Thes 2:8–12), where it will also be eliminated in turn by the Lord Jesus” (USCCB). False prophecy equivalent to falsehood. Lies submitted as truth sans facts. The Catholic bishops embellish 2 Thessalonians and their understanding of Paul with this key reading taken from Catholic Catechism 675. “Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh”. A man who glorifies himself rather than Christ, likely proposing his own, likely a revision of the revelation of Christ as contained in Apostolic Tradition. Lawlessness translated as sin, here specifically ‘breaking the law’ by the amelioration of rules. Rules replaced with a “religious deception” as the solution to problems. If problematic within the context of religion we’re addressing impediments to reconciliation.
“Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting”
According to CNN
This surely must be an instance in which a picture is worth (much more than) 1,000 words.
Thank you for a great encouragement to those of us out here, in the real world, are fighting to maintain our sanity during these times of lies vs. truth.
Dear Kathleen,
Thank you for your comment. It makes me very happy to know that anything I do or write contributes to making “regular people” (as if there were such a thing) consoled and strengthened in these times.
There are good, righteous people are around. We only have to stand up and support one another. Even if we are imperfect, and don’t see eye-to-eye on all the details. The times are too evil.
Blessings,
AR (Fr. Michael)
I am deeply disturbed by the collapse of respect for truth in the academy, the media and society as a whole. A colleague I deeply respect, commenting on a leader of his own political party’s deceptions (Susan Rice on Benghazi) said, “They all do it.”
My 2 cents worth on the divorce of facts from truth. This is not a new phenomenon. Let go back to Christ before Pilate, didn’t Pilate say “what is truth”. Then later when Christ rose from the dead and soldiers ran to the leaders of the temple for help, didn’t these leaders essentialy say they would cover for them. In this case one would thought the leaders would say something like “oh no, what did we do” and then go to Christ to seek repentence. But no they continue on with there own self deception, not caring about the truth.
My thought it comes down to a term “Mind Set” that was used back in the 1960’s and 1970’s to reflect what someone sees as the truth. In America this reflected it self as Manifest Destiny, later under Ronald Reagan America was a “Shiny City on a Hill” reflecting a mind set of America as a good country.
Now that Mind Set has flipped completely to many and now America is Evil etc. This flip has been created by Media, Pundits and Hollywood etc. who are the modern day Pilates and leaders of the temple when Christ was crucified. These elements of society do not care about the truth they are all in on their Mind Set, with no reflection on what is the truth. More over anyone not reflecting their Mind Set must be destroyed, and anyone who agrees with their Mind Setmust be honored and protected.
So if your pro abortion your a good guy, if your against abortion your evil. The Kauvanaugh hearing on his Supreme Court nomination could not be a more visible picture of this Mind Set. So Donald Trump who is pro life and promises more pro life judgesmust be vilified on every level. Forget the women that JFK, LBJ, Clinton and Biden abused, the Mind Set is to expose every bad thing Trump did and bury all the evils deeds of the previously mentioned presidents, primarily because President Trump is prolife.
Let’s continue with another example Trump tells the leaders of the countries in NATO they must pay the amount for NATO/defense they signed up for. Some like Germany say essentialy no way, since Trump follows though and cuts US troops deployment in Germany, they become a little miffed. The Germans Mind Set was the Americans are chumps and no way would any President call them on it.
It is clear that President Trump Mind Set is not only prolife but pro America. He cares about producing jobs for America. So he goes about cutting regulations, reducing taxes and creating Opportunity Zones etc. to support jobs and businesses. Now that is a Mind Set the media, pundits, intellectuals and hollywood really can’t stand. The truth like the need for not only supporting the birth of babies plus good middle class jobs is not part of their Mind Set. So we now have a clash of Mind Sets. In this clash, truth by many (summarized as liberals) is not part of the picture and never will be, since it does not fit within their Mind Set.
Excellent article. I have come to think that many of the “educated” and “expert” classes are living in a fog of cognitive dissonance. If you are familiar with postcolonial theory, queer theory, or any other offshoot of critical theory, you know what I mean. Frankly, I have come to think, and I don’t say it lightly, it is diabolical. These theorists prefer incoherence to reason in order to blur boundaries, irrationality over rationality by stating that reason is an oppressive tool of the West.
My question is this: how do we take back our education system? It is key to the whole problem we are facing and critical theory, disguised as diversity and equality, has made a new home in our public school system. Where to begin?
For some truth can be accepted if the timing is right, while others discarded facts even when the truth is unquestionably evident.
Yes – and you may want to reflect on your point about discarding facts as it relates to your own posts. “People in glass houses…”
Morgan,
I think truth is malleable when it comes to politics. And that applies to all sides. Outside of politics though it shouldn’t work that way.
It’s interesting how judgmental the SJW advocates are. How quick they are to condemn people without presenting one shred of evidence or proof to back up their claims. Of course they almost never allow themselves to be judged and any way, shape, or form. Everything is a one way street, their way or the highway. They behave just like the totalitarians that they claim to be opposed to.
*
The left has an ideological fixation with equality. The only place where their kind of equality can be found is in the graveyard, where everyone is totally, and equally, dead. Death as the great equalizer. Only a dead, lifeless universe could produce the kind of equality that the left craves. That is one reason why the left is really a death cult, with the body count to prove it. The proof is the Rein of Terror, the Soviet Union, and China’s Cultural Revolution. Things have gotten to the point to where they may be entering into their Manson family “Helter Skelter,” Jonestown Guyana kool-aid, and Hale-Bopp “Heaven’s Gate” suicide cult phase. They are just about as irrational as these cults. The recent looting and rioting are disturbing precursors.
There are three types of truth: Personal truth (more attuned to postmodernism), political truth (for pretenders), and objective truth which is the truth that cannot be qualified or disqualified because it is inherently true.
I am sure in a reputable journal like CWR we are talking about objective truth.
“Thankfully, people were able to shame the man accusing the poor Priest out of his ignorance, but such is the attitude which is growing like a malignant cancer throughout the world, a toxic union of ignorance and rash judgment. Some have said that this is a societal amplification of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the idea that a person’s arrogance is typically correlated to his ignorance.”
Or it could be malicious vanity combined with dishonesty. Especially since dishonesty (even a false criminal accusation) is almost never punished by organizations unless it involves an employee cheating his employer with his time. People hear the stories on the news about some CEO getting fired because of the (possibly false) accusation of some woman. Then they figure that not only can they get some innocent person fired or otherwise sanctioned, but they might even make the news to boot. (The mentioned person surely did.) The cowardice and injustice of organizations enables this evil behavior as does a complicit lurid media. I have read that in France a person’s name wouldn’t be publicized until AFTER he was convicted of a crime. Even apart from enabling slander, libel, or detraction in the US there are problems with guaranteeing an impartial jury.
“They used to say that things such as censorship and the Index of Forbidden Books were totally of the past. Education and a ‘scientific mindset’ would set us free from these parochial, tribalistic ways of thinking. But ancient and medieval people understood that heretical thinking, which doesn’t just mean errors on purely theological matters, can cause the collapse of civilization. Fallacious reasoning, when it reaches a critical mass, becomes a mass delusion. Some people may counter this assertion by saying that religious thinking is simply one mass delusion among thousands which have at one time or another gripped our collective psyches.”
Censorship on a limited scale is still with us. My comment will need to be approved. There is nothing inherently wrong with censorship. It depends on what is being censored and how the censorship process works. Liberals decried censorship when they were in the minority, but now that they have attained dominance they will make sure to fire any “heterodox” person. I know this from personal experience.
The question is what is the censored content? In the past the “morality words” were injustice, immorality, moral turpitude, sin, blasphemy, favoritism, fornication, etc. Now they are racism, xenophobia, homophobia, discrimination, harassment, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, abuse, psychological violence, etc. Has the older language of morality lost its truth or has it been flushed down the “Orwellian memory hole” by “new-fangled sins” (i.e. they are not all actually sins)? Clarity in thought and definitions leads to a clear and certain understanding concerning the issue. Such is the “politics of language.”
I believe that heresy should be largely understood in theological terms. One can be “heretical” in non-theological contexts, but provided that one is the lone voice of reason, there is no reason to attach an unjust stigma (or “badge of honor”) to it. Only religious truth matters in the end, so those with new, but unproven scientific ideas shouldn’t be called heretics. Those with unconventional non-religious ideas certainly should be challenged and called out for unethical behavior, but to call them heretics is not a good practice.
“While we live in a so-called ‘scientific’ era, we have never left behind as human beings the desire for authentic interpretation of the meaning of things.”
So the question is: who to trust? Religion teaches that one can’t know the future, but understanding of the present amounts to an interpretation of various data. Where does the data come from and is it correct? Part of the problem is the standard sound bite. For one who demands evidence in matters outside of supernatural science, unsupported statements aren’t good enough. (e.g. Where is the evidence that social distancing “flattened the curve?” Where is the data?)
“We are a culture that loves the untrue, the banal, and the self-contradictory.”
Where is the evidence for this? Based on what some media executive decides to put on the news? It is true that people might and probably ought to protest more, but the fact that they are not doesn’t necessarily mean that they approve. Either they don’t have a “voice,” they haven’t been asked, or they are apathetic. Only the last has an implication of moral fault, but when their job and even career can depend on their tacit acquiescence and sometimes even Stalinist active approval, one can’t expect a heroically charitable bold statement of uncomfortable truth. HR apparently is a little recognized vector of social engineering.
“He identified, like many cultural critics have, that the University is at the core of the decay in the modern discourse, with its corruption of language and thought. We Catholics especially have an epochal responsibility to uphold and/or rebuild the edifice of education which is one of the glories and foundations of Western Civilization.”
It’s not necessarily the university itself that is the problem. Skepticism, moral relativism, postmodernism, critical theory, unjust laws, and a lack of morality education seem to be behind the malaise. As such, the curriculum needs to be censored {e.g. no atheist [73% of philosophers are atheists (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-do-philosophers-believe/)]) or agnostic professors allowed}. Morality as taught by the Catholic Church must be included in any educational program.
“And like most out-of-control revolutions, the establishment is now setting up “Committees of Public Safety” whose purpose is to police thought and punish dissent in the name of upholding the commonweal. One need only look at the invasive and aggressive interventions of Facebook, Google, and Twitter in their crusade to squelch postmodern heresy.”
Censorship shouldn’t necessarily be left to private hands. Otherwise injustice is enabled, error permitted, and possibly truth suppressed. As Holy Scripture says: Woe unto those who call evil good and good evil.
“Speaking the truth, as many writers have said, is a rebellious and subversive act in an empire of lies. There is a difference, however, between speaking an untruth and speaking a lie.”
This is why censorship is important. Even though someone may believe himself to be correct, an untruth (e.g. religious heresy) will cause problems regardless of whether it is a lie or not. One could lay all of current moral and political problems to the slow unfolding of the logical consequences of allowing Protestantism to spread like a cancer, since its inception. Probably the censors should be Catholic religiously vowed men and a license to publicize or publicly speak would be a good idea.
A LIE is a Lie, Is a Lie, and if repeated often enough, it becomes believabel — Christ tells us that Satan was a Liar from the beginning. There is only One TV outlet that seems to make our Country seem likable — turned into nother channel after our First Lady’s Speech, and thought — TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS WE LIVE IN!!
“[A]ruling establishment that does not want to take the truth of the Marxist roots of the violence seriously.” Not only do they refuse to take it seriously, they refuse even to speak about it. Their silence beings to mind the words of Pastor Bonhoeffer: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
How many examples of lies and distortions masquerading as truth could we come up with if we discussed the current hysteria over this virus? I suspect this is adding to the despair felt over the loss of truth.
The article, while excellent, begins with an error. The professor in question was teaching a course in communication not Mandarin.
Over the weekend, I watched the no movie Fatima. This was the greatest example I’ve seen of the big lie, the lie of omission. The film depicted some of the apparitions revealed by mother Mary. However, the producer ignored the most important apparition of all, the request for prayers for the conversion of communist Russia due to the evils that were being conducted in the name of communism at that time. Mother Mary asked that all of the Princess of the church, acting in solidarity simultaneously, pray for the conversion of Russia and the dedication of Russia to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the 1980s, Saint John Paul, using modern technology, was in contact, in solidarity and simultaneously, with all the Princess of the worldwide church whereby they prayed for the conversion of Russia and the consecration of Russia to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Shortly after this consecration the Soviet Union fell and communism was gone from Russia. All the occupied countries of Europe were free, and the threat of nuclear war was ended. This was a irresponsible big lie by Hollywood. They had the opportunity to bring hope and faith to mankind by telling the truth of that phenomenon. Fatima and it’s prophecies were validated by the witness of the miracle of the sun by 70,000 people. Even the atheist and agnostics of our time would have to reevaluate their thinking on this issue. The faithful do not need validation, but the fallen Christians may take heed. Russia is currently An Orthodox Christian country. President Putin has converted to Christianity, and he has a Christian Chapel at his vacation Villa. All the red stars on the churches in Russia have now been replaced buy a crucifix. So much for the truth.
I really enjoyed reading this. From an ancient saying to Phaedo to Noam Chomsky to St. Paul to epistemological musings to a fictional character Fox Mulder Aquae Regiae is a pleasure for my brainale nerves synapsis and I bet he can dwell even deeper. How can a person have facts without truth or vice/versa? The Devil has a good try of it. “You shall not die.” That was true true at least not right away. “You shall be like God knowing good and evil.” In a way that was true but not like the omniscient God who knows all. Nor in his omnipotence. Kind of like stating facts, as far as they go, without speaking the fulness of the truth. He probably took the fruit and bit deliciously into it letting the juice run down his slithery skin to prove deceivably that there is no death smacking puckering and popping his lips. Are these half truths, half facts.