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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.
Two Approaches to Reality, One of Which Is True: Either Construing or Constructing Reality, Pt. 2
Only one reality exists. That reality is transcendent. It proceeds from God. Men must receive that reality by faith, that is, they must receive what God says. This does not ever contradict science.
The one reality is the truth, the goodness, and the beauty. God wants men to construe that reality and receive it. God’s truth is the truth, His goodness is the goodness, and His beauty is the beauty.
In his rebellion against God, man, speaking of mankind, constructs an alternative reality. It isn’t reality. As a noun, it’s a construct of reality.
Today people say that man constructs his own reality. If man constructs all reality, then anyone can construct his own reality. His truth is his truth, his goodness is his goodness, and his beauty is his beauty.
The rebellion of man proceeding from his sin nature authors a new reality. He becomes God. Rather than construing reality and receiving it, he constructs his own in rebellion against God.
As part of a growing rebellion against God others must receive a construction of reality and at least tolerate it. This rejects the truth, goodness, and beauty for a human construct. It validates man’s pride and lust.
Man will find out his constructions of realities are all lies, as part of “the lie.” The lie is the Satanic lie in rebellion against God, that takes on different forms or vessels, but with the same contents. When I was young, Avon sold perfume in a variety of containers, all the same scent.
In the end, God will unveil or unmask the lie and all the individual lies. They will all stand naked before His judgment. God will not receive them. He will say, Depart from me, and into eternal separation from Him.
Churches should bring God’s light to reality. They should manifest reality, the truth, goodness, and beauty. Instead, today churches associate with and accommodate the lie by receiving man’s construction of reality. They even call this love, corrupting the love of God and their neighbor.
People today use the terminology, “alternative reality,” which speaks of fiction. No one wants to hear that he believes in fiction, but he still assigns to his fiction a designation of reality. He wants what he wants, so he calls it reality, when it isn’t. This is a construct of reality.
Because in postmodernism all reality is a construct, then every reality should be tolerated. This toleration is now love. All reality is tolerated except for objective reality that has objective meaning. This is transcendent reality. All truth, goodness, and beauty comes from God, who is transcendent. You can’t receive God and reject transcendent reality, which is to say, reject reality itself.
One of the lies of the lie is that someone has his reality in the gospel, while rejecting reality. Does someone who rejects reality receive the gospel? Can a gospel extricated from reality be the gospel? Is its God, the God? Is a God removed from reality the God of the gospel, the God who saves?
More To Come
Two Approaches to Reality, One of Which Is True: Either Construing or Constructing Reality
Let’s say that I’m on vacation to Turkey. I want to look at Asia Minor and the geographical locations of the Apostle Paul’s churches there. In addition I’m interested in Istanbul and the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. While touring, I’m grabbed, a gunny sack pulled over my head, and thrown into the back of a dark cargo van. The next thing I’m sitting on a metal chair in a crumbling urban brick building with a camera pointed at my face.
Moslem terrorists rip the sack off my head and through very bright light I see several swarthy, angry men each with AK-47s. One of them puts a crumpled paper in my hand with English text, that says I must admit confess that as an American spy I reject the Republican form of government and pledge my allegiance to Allah.
I look up from the script my interrogators gave me and tell them that I can’t read this, because it isn’t true. One of them punches the side of my head with the butt of his rifle and I see a flash of bright lights. I shake out the cobwebs and everything looks blurry. As my brain starts to clear again, I feel a stream of blood down the side of my head. As everything starts to clear, I look at the script and reassess whether I might go ahead and read it.
What’s on the piece of paper isn’t true, even if the audience believes it. The kidnappers constructed a reality. It isn’t true. I don’t believe it. I reject it. Someone else wrote it. Saying it or writing it more doesn’t make it any more true. What they’ve constructed is not reality. The language on the paper means to construct a new reality.
Maybe you’ve heard that perception is reality. A person can create his own reality based on his perception, one which might not be true. A person with perceptions will call it reality, when it isn’t. This is a reality again of his own construction, perhaps based on his misconstruing his own reality. Perception is reality, is not reality. He could perceive reality, but his perception does not make it reality. Very often it is not. Even though it isn’t reality, he forms language to construct a reality as he perceives it.
Construct or Construe
A popular postmodern notion today is that people construct their own realities. Reality is what people want it to be. Therefore, they reject objective reality and/or objective meaning.
For the sake of discussion, I am saying that construing reality is describing reality as it is, as it really is. Constructing reality describes reality as we want it to be. God alone constructs reality outside of our own perception. At most, we construe it. If we truly construe reality, then we describe it as it is. If we don’t like the reality God constructed, out of rebellion against him we might construct our own reality. It still isn’t reality though.
Postmoderns say men constructed the patriarchy, that is, the patriarchy is a social construct. They constructed the patriarchy using language. They say language is powerful. Language constructs reality. Language also changes reality, so using language they construct a new reality, an egalitarian one. Construction of a new, different reality starts with deconstruction of the old. Then using language, they construct a new one.
The patriarchy is reality. People’s job is to construe reality. People might not like the patriarchy but that does not change the reality of patriarchy. Since God constructs reality, reality is objective and, therefore, meaning is objective. Our life only has meaning if it describes reality as it really is. Someone construes reality only when he describes it or understands it as it really is.
Is patriarchy construing reality or constructing reality? It construes reality. It construes what God constructed. Why do people then construct reality? Objective reality, what we should call “the truth,” contradicts people’s lusts. They then construct a reality that conforms to their lust and call it their own reality. Also, they call it their truth. They use language to construct their own reality. This is why language becomes so important in secular institutions. They reject God, leaving themselves to construct their own reality.
The Idolatry of Using Language to Construct a New Reality
In the beginning, God constructed reality out of language. John 1:1-3 read:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
The Word made all things. With Him was not anything made that was made. God alone did this or does this. When a man constructs his own reality using language, it is a form of idolatry that proceeds from pride and lust. Therefore, he worships and serves the creature rather than the Creator (cf. Romans 1:25).
Rejecting reality, that is, not describing it as it really is, also rejects God. It is a more subtle and significant way to eliminate God or to dethrone Him. God created everything for pleasure. Man deconstructs reality and constructs his own reality for his own pleasure.
Scripture reveals the reality God constructed, using language. God spoke the world into existence. He upholds all things by the Word of His power. God’s Words construct reality.
Those God created are responsible to construe reality based upon scripture. No one is neutral. When they don’t receive what God said, they will construct a new reality with their own language in defiance of God.
More to Come
Reality and Truth: Celebrity Conservatives Versus True Bible Believers
Perhaps you, like me, as a Christian, pay attention to certain celebrity conservatives, who take many of the same or similar viewpoints as you. You know there are differences. Where is the overlap?
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