The eCrozier

 Daily prayers and religious reading and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.  – C.S. Lewis

 C.S. Lewis, like with most of his observations about God and human nature, was right.

We do “have to be continually reminded of what we believe,” because we human beings are not nearly as clever or smart as we would hope. So, it is necessary for us to have the daily reinforcement of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels, what the Church proclaims to be true in the Creeds, and the common prayer of the saints on earth and in heaven. Without such regular reintegration of the faith, we may not forget entirely who we are in Christ, but we may get distracted or even deceived (see John 10).

Those who wish to influence us and other members of the public are counting on our vulnerability to distraction and deception. For example, in April, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona said: “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.” But a fact check of the services of Planned Parenthood determined that only 3% of their services are abortion related. Later his staff issued this clarification: The senator’s remark “was not intended to be a factual statement but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions in taxpayer dollars, does subsidize abortions.” If it “was not intended to be a factual statement,” then why did he say it? I share Senator Kyl’s revulsion for abortion, but facts cannot be made up. Mark Twain famously said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Senator Kyl is by no means alone in this and it is almost unfair to single him out because this is becoming commonplace. Public figures of all persuasions are doing this, but, of course, that does not make it right just because so many are. Visit the Pulitzer Prize winning organization, Politifact, and you can see that Senator Kyl is in good, or bad, company, as the case may be. Many people seem to have adopted Stephen Colbert’s satirical standard of truth, which he calls “truthiness.” He defines this as “something that sounds true to me so it must be.”

It seems a new post-modern paradigm has arrived that proclaims truth as: (1) Whatever someone says passionately enough; and, (2) Whatever enough people want to believe. For example, just because some people don’t want to believe that human activity is contributing significantly to climate change and that this is disastrous for the earth, does not mean it is not true. The overwhelming scientific evidence says it is true.

Truth, however, cannot be so mutable and pliable that it can be changed or bended to our will and desires. Truth exists beyond our biases and prejudices. The danger imbedded in our present cultural ethos around truth is that because many are playing so fast and loose with the truth, people will just come to accept such practice as normative. “Everyone does it,” will become a common justification. But where will such a stance toward truth leave us as a people?

+Scott