All of us who have kids have told them over and over again, and then over and over yet again, how important it is for them to be truthful even when the truth hurts. We try our hardest to impress on them that they should live by truth and not by lies. We remember our parents saying these things to us when we were kids.
So it should go without saying that the Bible -- aka the Good Book, heavenly guidebook, word of God, last word, holy writ, et al -- speaks highly of the truth.
I love history and have always been into quotes and aphorisms. A couple decades ago, when thinking more in terms of quotes from history than from the Bible, one of the lines I came across that immediately left an impression was straight from the New Testament, specifically 3 John 1:4: "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in truth."
Just about everybody has heard the phrase "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free," but most people don't realize it comes from the Gospel of John.
Proverbs 12 says "truthful lips endure forever," while warning that "lying lips are an abomination to the Lord."
In 1 Corinthians, Paul famously penned a lengthy explanation of love in which he declared that it "rejoices with the truth."
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But the Bible goes way beyond quotes like those... way, way beyond... for in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks to a fretful Thomas and affirms "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."
Note that he does not say "tell the truth," he says "I am the truth." That casts things in an entirely different light and makes me think of 2 Thessalonians, which, when talking about "those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus," says "they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might." Therein lies the biblical basis for the common belief that Hell means separation from God.
And seeing as how I'm something of a history buff and quotes geek, these lines prompt my brain to fast-forward 17 centuries to one of America's Founding Fathers: John Adams. When he defended redcoats (!) who acted in self-defense during the Boston Massacre, Adams tapped into something previously written by French novelist Alain-René Lesage and stressed that, popular sentiment be damned, "facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
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There is a sense right now, at least here in the Western world, that "the culture" has gone insane and is rapidly pushing civilization to the edge of a cliff, eager to hurl it over and watch it shatter on the rocks.
One needn't be Christian or conservative to get this sense, as there are atheists (e.g. Charles C. W. Cooke) and prominent liberals (e.g. Jonathan Chait) who get it and are bloody well disturbed by it.
The culture is defined as that which monopolizes entertainment and mainstream media and thereby wields outsize power in public discourse: Namely political correctness and its steroidal offspring that aims to "cancel" whoever and whatever it has decided to dislike in the last three seconds. Denial of truth is the common denominator from one end of the culture to the other.
The most prominent denial of truth at this instant involves gender. We are being told (not asked) to believe (not merely pretend) that human beings come in genders other than male and female, and can literally hop from one to another based on however he or she feels -- although I might get in trouble for saying "he or she," since the culture is currently advising that we replace those words with "they" until we get clarification from whoever we're talking about.
We are being told (not asked) to believe (not merely pretend) that a man is a woman if he (sorry, they) claims to "identify as" a woman, never mind the genitalia, testosterone, pelvic structure, muscle mass, and other (ahem) scientific facts. If he/they says he/they is a female, we must refer to he/they as either "she" or "they" and never consider uttering the abhorrent pronoun "he" unless we are granted permission.
Apparently we are also supposed to ignore the fact that "they" is plural and thus cannot be used to refer to individuals. Because after all, what are facts? Facts are proof that truth exists regardless of what we want, outside of what John Adams referred to as wishes and inclinations and passions. But the culture will not tolerate the idea of anything, including truth, declining to obey its commands.
We are being told non-satirically that men must be permitted to participate in women's sports if they "identify as" women... which triggers obviously satirical headlines, like one from the obviously satirical Babylon Bee that read "Female Weightlifter Suffers Tragic Testicle Injury Just Weeks Before Tokyo Olympics"... which in turn trigger respected voices from the culture to non-satirically publish fact-checks of the satire in order to "disprove" it, as if it was ever meant to be taken as anything other than satire.
Snopes has literally (not figuratively) published more than 30 fact-checks of Babylon Bee articles, including one that was headlined "California Considering a Tax on Breathing." In 2018, Facebook, citing these fact-checks by Snopes, threatened to de-platform and de-monetize the Bee, and this March an article in the New York Times described the Bee not as the satirical site it obviously is but rather as a "far-right misinformation site."
Attacks like these are not outliers. They are common, they are deliberate, they have become the norm, and no, they are not limited to just one wing of our political divide.
Do you think it's coincidence that this kind of truthless poppycock has come to dominate Western culture right as Western culture races drifts farther away from biblical precepts than it ever dreamed of in the past?
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The denial of God/truth has not happened suddenly, however. It is the logical continuation of a trend that has been ongoing throughout my life. It's worth noting that I am 50 years old and much of the foundation for our denial was poured 48 years ago, in 1973, when the Big Lie was officiously stamped onto American law by a Supreme Court that twisted itself like a circus balloon to avoid acknowleding the obvious.
The Big Lie was delivered in the package of a federal case officially called Jane Doe, et. al. v. Henry Wade, District Attorney of Dallas, and better known simply as Roe v. Wade. If I begin to go into the lies legal absurdities that were invoked in that case, this post will last forever -- so in order to try to stay on point, I'll just say that the Big Lie itself was the claim that a human being is not a human being.
That claim is what the culture needed to sell in order for abortion to gain just enough support -- and attract little enough outrage -- for Roe to be decided in such a way that abortion became sacrosanct and its victims became afterthoughts.
15 years after Roe, when I was in my teens, it was still common to hear supposed authorities (who knew they were lying) claim that a human fetus or embryo is "just a clump of cells" or "not yet human." The culture amplified those lies and caricatured anybody who dared dissent.
The culture got its way by burrowing into young minds, averting young eyes from the preciousness of life, and painting a propagandized portrait of parenthood as being droll and oppressive. Under the sway of the culture infants were often talked about as impediments rather than fulfillments, and teenagers who became pregnant were often described as "ruining" or "jeopardizing" their futures.
By the time it became patently absurd to continue denying that life is human as soon as a human sperm fertilizes a human egg, the culture had already inoculated itself against reason by elevating the word "choice" to the level of religious sacrament.
When a favored figure of the culture publicly proclaims his or her devotion to "the right to choose," you can rest assured that he or she is not talking about your right to choose to build something on your own property; or your right to choose where your children go to school; or your right to choose to draw a picture of Mohammad; or your right to choose to protect your family by using your own money to purchase a gun to defend against attackers who are 50 pounds heavier and 20 years younger than you (despite the fact that the right of "the people" to own guns, unlike the right to procure an abortion, actually is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution).
Nope. When favored figures of the culture publicly proclaim their devotion to "choice," they are talking about one thing and one thing only, and they go out of their way to avoid describing that thing or even saying its name. Usually they allude to it by way of euphemism and obfuscation.
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In every fundamental way, the culture's fierce commitment to The Choice is a commitment to untruth. It is a commitment that places one's self (as long as one is female [even if one does not "identify as" female]) in the role of God. The mindset fueling this commitment to The Choice devalues life in the abstract; and inexorably, the actual lives of every person who is persuaded to make The Choice winds up being damaged by it.
The culture says it wants to protect women, and it claims that before 1973 women often died in "back alley abortions," yet the culture does not want abortion clinics to be subject to health and safety regulations.
The culture says it wants women to make "fully informed decisions," yet it opposes any requirements that women considering an abortion be provided with any information about any alternatives.
The culture says those who disagree with it about abortion are "men making laws governing women's bodies," yet it never bothers to acknowledge: 1) that women oppose abortion in far greater numbers than men, 2) that women have authored much of the anti-abortion legislation the culture hates, and 3) that, most importantly, the bodies in question are not the women's but rather the babies'.
And it has to be stressed that while the culture supports a mother's absolute right to end a baby's life for any reason she chooses, at any stage of pregnancy right up to delivery, it does not support giving that baby's very own father any right to take any legal action that might save the baby's life.
It's hard to imagine anything more onerous that what I've already said, but consider this: Although the culture claims it wants to protect women and girls, it protests whenever a person who disagrees with it about abortion attempts to actually protect women and girls by talking to them about the emotional trauma they might experience as a result of having an abortion.
And later, when a woman or girl has had an abortion and is looking back on it feeling depressed and lonely and insecure, the only first people to reach out to her with love and support and understanding are the same ones who speak out against abortion. Almost without exception, they are people who believe biblical precepts and strive to follow them rather than mock them.
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This post is about the Bible, not abortion. When I started typing it I did not anticipate the latter being so prominent, but sometimes pieces of writing reveal themselves to the author as they are being written.
Abortion does belong here and I'm not done quite yet.
I feel compelled to say that I know women who have had abortions, most of whom were young and terrified when they made The Choice. They are friends of mine, some are even closer than friends, and one is somebody I treasure in ways that words cannot describe.
I also know a man who talked his girlfriend into having an abortion when they were young.
Those people were all harmed by The Choice, not helped by it. The effect it had on their lives was not the effect they sought.
I do not believe any of those people purchased a one-way ticket to Hell when they made their decision. Because I know God's love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness are theirs for the taking, if they are willing to accept it.
Perhaps you're thinking I should point to the Bible for some evidence of that, since this post is about the Bible? Well, Psalm 103 says of God that "as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us," and 1 John 1:9 asserts "if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Hebrews 8:12 quotes Jesus himself saying "I will remember their sins no more."
Right now I am thinking of a woman I do not know but once saw in the flesh. She is one one of my favorite singers and has been in the public eye as long as I can recall. I am thinking of Stevie Nicks.
Nicks wrote and of course sang the song "Sara," which was released in 1979 and went Top 10 and gets played almost as much now as it did then. Nicks has acknowledged that "Sara" is, in part, about her aborted daughter, which makes the lyrics especially haunting: "Wait a minute baby / Stay with me a while ... Sara, you're the poet in my heart ... Now it's gone ... There's a heartbeat / And it never really died."
I do not know what thoughts go through Stevie Nicks's mind, what feelings ripple through her heart, or whether she has any relationship with God... but she has spoken several times about her choice (choices actually, for she's had more than one abortion) and when she speaks about it she never seems like a person who is at peace.
Nicks is in her 74th year and I can't shake the feeling that her soul is lost somewhere in that wasteland of "spiritual but not religious" confusion, not seeing the open and welcoming hand of God that is right in front her.
She is a denizen of the culture, one of its own, and I can't shake the feeling that the culture doesn't really care what will become of her soul after her days on Earth run out.
Maybe I'm reading her wrong. Hopefully she isn't lost. She doesn't need to be. And neither do we, no matter what we are struggling with or afflicted by. For as it says in Isaiah: "He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as he hears it, he answers you."
To be continued...
If you want to read the previous installments in this series, here they are: Parts One, Two, Three, and Four.
