On the morning the above picture was taken, I was standing on a piece of real estate at about 12,000 feet above sea level. The temperature was about 25 degrees and the wind velocity made it fee much colder. There is a public rest room not far behind me with an electric hand dryer. I retreated from the scene before me every ten minutes to let the warm air blow up my jacket sleeves.
It’s beautiful, isn’t it. I couldn’t stop pressing the camera’s shutter button. I think I counted almost 900 pictures (a regrettable impulse when I got back to my computer with photo software up and running). The sheer beauty of the sunrise on this particular morning would have been a glorious last visual parade before being lulled into the quiet euphoria of death by hypothermia.
This website is about truth. It is about trust and the alarming trends in our culture that promise to redefine integrity so that lies no long contradict truth. This leave us all languishing in a society where seemingly no one can be counted on to act with honor.
Truth objectively defined today is targeted for censure because it does not serve one’s personal or social agenda. Whether this is by deliberate design or the inevitable consequence of moral erosion doesn’t really matter.
Why does it matter? It matters to the kind of world we live in. Trust is necessary to both our personal lives as well as to the corporate life of the society we live in. Can you imagine your life in a world without a sound reason to trust in a medical doctor? Without being grounded in “scientific” truth, increasing percentages of doctors are easily willing to misrepresent the science of our medical condition.
Think about trust in those who occupy positions of governing authority. They are supposed to examples of integrity. Instead they are examples of power-crazed liars who will say anything that furthers their agenda–an agenda that never actually has your interests in view.
Think about the future of this world. It is very hard not to be completely fixated on our current situation in life without any driving concern for the people around us and especially for the next generation.
Truth is what corresponds to reality–a reality that we can alter only in our imaginative capabilities. We cannot truthfully change a man into a woman in the objective physical reality that exists outside our minds. We have no control over what is real. We did not make the mountain. We did not make the galaxy or the universe beyond it. The only place where we can interfere with physics is in our imagination.
We can deface some of reality. We can burn down forests and pollute oceans. We can perform surgical procedures that change the appearance of reality. Doctors can surgically alter many things about us. But what is real stubbornly refuses the efforts we make to change the meaning of who we are.
Reality is what it is. It is a mark of insanity when a person can no longer distinguish between what is real and what we concoct in our minds that we interpret as real. A child does know the difference between a horse made out of sticks and a horse grazing in a field of grass.
Our imaginative skills may be able to come up with a much altered reality in our minds, but this can have no effect whatsoever on what is actually real. We can believe that something false is true, but what is actually true is well beyond our human ability to change.
The crosshairs are fixed on the truth wherever the shooter can find it. The trigger is pulled with reckless abandon. It is possible to put the truth to death in our own minds, but truth is not something that any human being, or all human beings together, can murder. We can exchange the truth for a lie. Yet the damage this does does not change the truth. It does, however, damage ourselves.
What do you think will happen to a civilization that has no place where the truth can be spoken? What happens in a society that embraces the idea that truth is whatever we make it to be–whatever we want it to be? What happens to you personally if the small piece of the world that you live in becomes infested with falsehoods masquerading as truth–and you lose the ability to detect this as it happens?
There is hope, however. But it is only individual hope. Humanity en masse has already sealed its fate. There is no turning back to reclaim what was bartered away in unwise haste.
Human government no longer has truth as a fundamental law. Government is not an ethereal idea. Government is people who crave the power to regulate the lives of other people. Universities are people that have their own agenda as well. They employ people who teach that truth is a ridiculous “religious” fantasy. Students are hoodwinked into coveted membership of “the “educated.”
Nothing matters but the agenda. Everything bows to the agenda. Education is not to educate but to indoctrinate. If history should caution the acceptance of the agenda, history is rewritten. Facts matter not. Facts are real. Yet the criteria for what is real is changed in the human mind by humans themselves. Thus we mar the connections between our personhood and that of all others. These are the consequences whether intended or unintended.
Some of us hope that everything will return to “normal” sooner rather than later. What was normal, however, is also being redefined. Sometimes this is out of compassion. We do not want to treat human beings with physical or cognitive impairments as worthless human beings (there was a time when treating them as freaks of nature was “normal”). But we have “normalized” much in our world that must eventually, and of necessity, yield a poisonous fruit.
But person by person, perhaps family by family, or even group by group, we can prepare ourselves for life in the real world. One man or woman of integrity in a corporation operating in falsehood can make a meaningful difference.
Do we have the courage to look carefully inside our own soul? This kind of looking requires a mind that knows the difference between what is true and what is not true. For those who possess not this requirement, there is, thankfully, the possibility of learning. Truth is not something that can be long concealed. Truth is more powerful than falsehood. Humanity is being corrupted by falsehood. We can, however, be saved by truth.
Do you have the courage to learn? To learn what is real; to learn why it matters; and to learn how humanity is being corrupted by a “system” that defines truth not by what is real but by the quest for ultimate human autonomy.
We must always remember that with ultimate human autonomy there comes the inescapable reality that men and women will do and say whatever it takes to be more ultimate in autonomy than the rest of us.