Did you know that there is a substantial percentage of persons who never read a book and seldom read an article from a newspaper or magazine? You don’t need a university degree to read. But there is a growing number of high school students and graduates who do not have the educated capacity to read beyond billboards or menu items at a fast food restaurant (and now you don’t even have to read a menu, you can point to a picture of what you want!).

There’s a wonderful exchange of conversation in the television period piece,  Wives and Daughters. Near the end the budding naturalist Roger Hamely,  recently returned from Abyssinia, is asked by Lord Cumner to say something in the language native to this country (now called Ethiopia). Roger says something in the Abyssinian language and then translates what he just said into English: “A person learns what he needs to know.” “Well,” says Lord Cumner, “that’s very edifying.” It is also alarming if we begin to believe that we do not need to know how to read and therefore do not need to learn how to read.

Reading another person’s words ought not to be a threat to our own understanding of the world we all live in. Do we need to understand the world we all live in? Apparently not. But in truth, yes. And each person does in fact have an understanding of the world in which we all live. Our understanding may not be wholly shaped by what we read. Where then does our understanding come from? What forces outside our own conversation with ourselves exert formative influences upon our understanding?

We cannot continue to compensate for the wilful ignorance. We must learn what we need to know. We cannot be passive. Shaping how we think is our own responsibility. What we believe (and don’t believe) is decisively our own choice. How we as individual persons relate to other individual persons may often be the result of how others have treated us. But what we become as persons is still a matter of our own making. We are not enslaved and forced against our will to believe or behave as if our lives were under someone else’s tyranny. This is because of the nature of personal liberty.

Reading is vital, indispensable to life because having knowledge is necessary to life. If we determine to be a carpenter we must acquire the knowledge to be a carpenter. If we determine to be a taxi driver we must acquire knowledge of the the layout of the city where we drive a taxi.

But a person’s vocation is not the summary meaning of his or her life as a human being. We need knowledge beyond the requirements of our vocation in order to live a meaningful life. Yet we need to know how that knowledge is acquired and whether it is true to reality or shaped and sorted in service to a particular agenda.

To be transparent, this website has an agenda. Every source of information has an agenda either stated outright or hidden from discerning minds. What we are after here is the ability to think critically about the agendas to which we are exposed throughout all of life. Do we join the club or partner with the opposition?

For fuller transparency, this website advocates for truth. Truth is in the crosshairs of our culture. There are agendas being exerted on our society that have a vested interest in removing all knowledge that would expose the agenda to a critical review that would undermine the processes of making the agenda the law of the land. Let it be clear, then, that we regard truth as objective reality that cannot be manipulated by anyone. Yes, there are people who say that a hickory tree is an amphibious creature, but reality is hardly altered by such insanity. Reality is not subject to what someone says. And a person’s sanity is diagnosed by his or her comprehension of what is real against what is imaginary. If someone imagines that a tree is a toad and then shapes his or her “reality” according to this perception, that person is rightly diagnosed as insane.

Truth is not a liquid that simply takes the shape of whatever container it is poured into. Truth is a body of knowledge that corresponds exactly to what is factually real no matter who is examining it. It is not a self-defined body of knowledge. One’s agenda may attempt to exert power over truth, but can such an agenda be worthy of anyone’s trust?

This website has an agenda and its visitors are entitled to know what it is. You may come to regard it as subverting your own agenda. This is the nature of autonomy in the 21st century. But at the end of the day each person is confronted by what is real and therefore true. If autonomy (the full authority of self) is your worldview (i.e. your religion), then this website is going to be your nemesis. We will continue to wonder whether you will read it anyway.