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The Relationship Between Truth and Reality
Collapse of Western Civilization
Many people are asking whether the West or the Western world, once mostly called Western civilization, is on the verge of collapse. I believe people stopped using “Western civilization,” because they question the civilization now of the West. Maybe the West isn’t civilized any more. But why? What happened to the West? It relates to God and the Bible for sure, but in a more rudimentary form, truth and reality.
For many decades the leading intelligentsia of the West called Western civilization bad, because of its origins, they would say, in colonialism, racism, exploitation, and having white skin. They treat these ironically as even the sins of the West. This necessitated a kind of repentance and transformation, led by the elites of the West into something vastly different than what it once was.
The changes in the West from what it once was, from its foundational and fundamental values, resulted now in an inability to defend itself. It has no basis for its own existence, giving a good argument for those who wish to destroy it. The military defenses of the West also withered away because it spent its money on globalism, welfare programs, egalitarianism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. They sucked up revenues like quick sand.
Inclusion or Exclusion
Someone recently said that the West embraced John Lennon’s song like an anthem, that there is nothing to live or to die for, the world that they imagine. They prefer the world of their imagination, rather than the real world, the actual one in which we and they live.
The attack on nationalism combats exclusion. Nations by nature exclude, not include. This is the cause of division that gives people something to live or to die for. An irony of it is of course that it caused the rise of various groups that receive their identity from victimization. They are oppressed in many various ways by a sundry of oppressors. What proceeded is instead a fight for power all of the time.
Objective Truth or Feelings and Opinions
Powerful intellectual elites of the West started telling us decades ago, and this has only become worse, that there is no objective truth. To get there, they had to eliminate God, the supernatural origin of heaven and earth, a first cause. The belief in God was unsophisticated and again of course resulted in exclusion. The truly sophisticated said, there is only opinion. Everything is relative or only opinion. What I feel is what is.
Feeling in the new and deteriorating West trumps all facts. This is to say that the subjective is superior to the objective. If no objective truth, then also no lie, so you can’t know the difference between truth and lies. You can’t know, so you also then become very gullible to lies. Not knowing the difference between truth and lies means you also have no reason. Everything becomes irrational. A hyper-rational society, an intellectual one, becomes irrational, which is a paradox.
Reality and Truth
What really happens, happened, and will happen is reality. That is also truth. Denying reality is also denying the truth. I like to refer to the reality of the world represented in the hymn, This Is My Father’s World. The world really is the Father’s and He also wrote the Bible. The Bible, which is the truth, matches with reality. Scripture is a guide to reality.
Reality is the state of things as they actually exist. It refers to the actual state of affairs, facts, or conditions that are present in the world, independent of our perceptions or beliefs about them. A statement or belief that is true will however correspond to a fact in reality. When we deal with the truth, we are also dealing with reality. The two do not separate from one another.
Today truth and reality seem, and I say “seem,” not to correlate with one another. They diverge in this world in which we live. In that sense and in others, we live in a post-truth world. That should not surprise someone, when he reads the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:4, when he calls Satan, “the god of this world.” Jesus had said in John 8:44 that Satan is the father of lies. What Satan says does not correspond to reality. He lies about reality. For instance, he told Eve, “Ye shall not surely die.”
Both heaven and earth, everything there is, operate on absolute truth. You can test if it is true, like defying the law of gravity, and find out. Whether you believe it or not, it still holds true. It’s as simple as falling from a cliff and then hitting the ground.
Truth and Power
The chief enemies of the truth today lead a pervasive population that holds to, promotes, and even enforces the unreal and false. Sometimes they defend their cause by saying that truth, which is reality, is a mere construct of power. With truth as a construct, they reconstruct a different reality and call it their truth.
Today the most consequential governing authority, the education system between kindergarten and postgraduate in the United States. won’t allow the teaching or propagation of the truth or reality. That’s not the primary interest any more if not any interest. Many other authoritative and influential institutions or entities cooperate with the bias against the truth and reality, including the legal system (courts) and the mainstream media. One entire political party is against truth or reality, the Democrat Party.
Effect on Churches
Churches succumb to this death of truth and reality. They do it mainly by questioning their own authority. The churches and their leaders undermine scripture and its interpretation, and call it humility or a basis for unity. In part this is a fear of power.
Without truth, everything becomes about who has power. Truth is not objective, so one must have power to assert his own opinions. Nothing is truth, it is only the construction of power. This goes back to the victim and oppressor narrative. Empowerment is the ability or freedom to assert ones self.
The premier institution of truth, the church, literally the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15), acceded to power over fear. Churches don’t want to victimize anyone with the truth, or even just most truths, so they acquiesce to lies, which, yes, distort reality. People do not know the truth about the world God created, because of churches that fear man more than they do God.
Gaslighting
What Gaslighting Is
Today a word we are hearing very often, one that I never heard as I grew up, is “gaslighting.” As I looked to see if I had ever used the word in any of the written material of this blog site, I found none. People use the term all the time and in a popular manner, but it has a psychological meaning. Psychology Today defined it:
Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.
I see and hear gaslighting all the time from the political left. It includes a blatant form of lying, that requires people to believe something demonstrably untrue.
Merriam-Webster named “gaslighting” its word of the year for 2023 because it said it was a pervasive term that shaped interactions and was relevant to our current social climate. The dictionary defines gaslighting as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage.” In the previous year of 2022, lookups for the word “gaslighting” occurred 1740% more than the previous year according to Merriam-Webster online.
If I were to sum up the concept of gaslighting in the clearest way possible, it is that gaslighting requires obedience to a lie. It’s not just lying, but requiring obedience to that lie. It says something different happened than what many, witnesses, even every witness, plainly see. Nevertheless, you must stand and nod your head “yes” to the gaslighter or face some form of retribution.
Examples and History of Gaslighting
The entire left gaslit the country on the condition of President Biden. Now it again gaslights the whole United States by giving a particular false impression about Vice President Harris. The left did this in 2016 with the Russian collusion hoax, saying that then President Trump was a Russian agent. For decades the so-called scientific community gaslit everyone with the theory of evolution, that then turned into the science of evolution, even though it isn’t scientific. Egalitarianism, that men and women are equal in authority and that they can fulfill each other’s roles, is also gaslighting.
Apparently the word “gaslight” arose from a 1938 British play, called “Gaslight.” Someone wrote the plot:
Set among London’s elite during the Victorian era, it portrays a seemingly genteel husband using lies and manipulation to isolate his heiress wife and persuade her that she is mentally unwell so that he can steal from her.
In scripture, the Pharisees gaslit the entire nation Israel with their teaching, leaving the people of Israel wallowing in spiritual darkness. The level of deceit in the world today, I would assess, is at an all time high with maybe the exception of the days of Noah. Everywhere you look, those in positions of authority spread bold-faced lies about the most important subjects.
A Challenge
It’s easy today for professing Christians to concern themselves deeply with government and elections, but the biggest ongoing gaslighting occurs concerning the Bible. False religion and false teachers gaslight billions with falsehoods and lies.
Even though Satan wants to destroy the Bible, a part of that larger strategy is destroying the truth itself. The gaslighting everywhere results in deceit on a mass scale. Men become apathetic toward the truth in this world scale flurry of lies. People give up, cutting through the lies seeming not to be worth the effort. They see the sheer difficulty of penetrating the fog of deceit as a legitimate excuse to hedge against future judgment. No one could be accountable to believe with so many lies everywhere. And yet that too is a lie, even a bigger one.
Gaslighting right now happens at epic proportions. It’s as if the gaslighters are attempting to top one another with the sheer audacity. It is a high level of disrespect to the targets or audience of the gaslighting, that they think that it will work at this scale. They have good reason to think they’ll fool people, because it’s working.
I Don’t Want to Scare You But This Could Scare You
Artificial Intelligence
I was preparing to write about AI (Artificial Intelligence) today, something I started last week, before I even heard about the public interview with Elon Musk. What he said added to what I will write here. In general, I’m following two threads of thought. The first is the potential control of AI or whoever possesses the keys to AI. It relates to eschatology.
Many of you already think about it or thought about it. Maybe you already don’t put very much trust in institutions. I typed “human institutions,” but there isn’t any other kind. Every institution is a human one. How “off the grid” could any one person live and still fulfill his purpose for existence?
Dependence
Would I be wrong to say that something like 99% plus of people today depend on electronic systems? I draw a circle around myself and start working my way out. To start, I’m typing this on a laptop computer connected by WIFI through a router to the internet. As you read this, it started here where I sit and reached you through an amazing pathway at maybe something like the speed of light.
The power grid now depends on massive computers. The decision to bring generators on line or cut off an overloaded portion was not long ago done by people. In congested areas, computers control automobile traffic. Close to 90% use a mobile phone for that communication. These too are powerful computers.
Money
Even if only 40-50 percent of people use mobile banking, me included, all banking is computerized. Like probably all of you, I don’t see my money, if currency is money. Currency isn’t money, when it’s worthless as paper and ink. Some of you reading have gold somewhere, actual physical gold, in what you hope is a safe place. I hope that will work for you if or when everything breaks down. Maybe someone will trade you something you need for the gold you possess.
I hate to say this, but almost all of my money could disappear in less than one second of the time computers started controlling everything. Or, more likely in my opinion, when someone controlling all the computers took control of everything with the computers. I did not earn much in my lifetime, but I did relatively well with stewardship of the small amount. Still, all of that wealth over my entire lifetime could vanquish in one brief moment. How do I or how would I stop it?
Diversification?
The adage, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, I think I follow it. However, I have all of those eggs under the dominion of computers in some fashion. I own property. A computer says I own property. Maybe a piece of paper sits in a file somewhere too, but I’m really not sure on that. When computers take over, can I use a computerized mobile phone to talk to a real person about my ownership of that property?
I was thinking about this subject as it related to college loans. I finished college and graduate school with zero debt. Other people out there have huge money they owe. A few people could in essence push one button and all of that debt disappears. Someone got paid. Instead of the student or his parents paying, everyone shares in the elimination of their debt in a computer. That’s you and me. We’ll pay that modern art professor or critical theory instructor with higher expense for eggs and milk.
How to Prepare?
Much more could be said. What we know from the Bible is that at some future time on earth, a few people will control everything on earth by controlling the power to buy or sell. It’s much easier to see how they can do that. If anything close to that occurs before that future time, like a dress rehearsal, how should I prepare for that?
Programmed to Deceive
This year at Easter time, and I prefer Resurrection time, I prepared a resurrection sermon. In doing so, I read what ChatGPT, an AI, wrote about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I read this article with eagerness, because I thought that the AI would write without bias. AI would take all the information on the internet and tell the truth. It did not.
As a disclaimer, ChatGPT was relatively objective. It said the resurrection of Christ had historical evidence. However, it called it still a matter of faith, differentiating that from, what we might call, a historical event. That part of the ChatGPT’s assessment others programmed into it. They would not allow ChatGPT to call the resurrection true, just function according to all the information out there.
Present powers don’t want an objective AI presence. They want to program parameters and algorhythms for purposeful misinformation, a bias that supports their view of the world. Scripture indicates that in the future deceit will increase to all time proportions. A few people could easily use a ChatGPT to fool more people than the lies already occurring.
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