"WHAT IS TRUTH?"

This is the question that Pilate posed to Jesus during his trial (John 18:37-38). As our pastor pointed out in a recent sermon, Pilate was not at all interested in Jesus' reply but probably asked the question with a sneer on his face. And I would say that Pilate's approach to the truth was the typical response of a politician who is more interested in retaining his power than bothering himself with whether something is true or not. I once attended an industry banquet in which the guest speaker was the speechwriter for a certain ex-president. He got up before the group and looked us over with a scowl of utter contempt on his face and declared, “I have been told that a number of you are scientists and engineers. And I have to say that I have a lot of trouble with people like you. You seem to feel that there is such a thing as truth. Well let me tell you, truth is whatever the people want it to be.”

“The truth will set you free” comes from John 8:32. But the context starts with the previous verse in which Jesus makes it clear that knowing the truth is continuing to abide in Jesus' words. Interestingly, this quotation is the motto of CalTech University and was carved in the side of the original CIA building. CalTech certainly had scientific truth in mind when they chose this motto taken out of context, and the CIA used it to apply to military intelligence. Neither is the biblical definition of truth as described by Jesus.

Johns Hopkins University also chose this verse for their motto. This research institution was founded by money donated by a wealthy Quaker businessman and named after him. In digging into Hopkins' life, the university found out that he was a slave owner despite strong Quaker opposition to slavery. It is a little ironic then that his namesake university claimed that the truth would set people free when Hopkins refused to free his own slaves. Biblical truth demands that one acts on it, not just accept it intellectually.

New Age proponents, on the other hand, hold to the belief that all religions lead to God, even though some of them believe in no god at all and others worship multiple gods. Unfortunately, this idea that your truth is just as good as my truth had been perpetuated to the point where any crackpot on the internet can claim that a pizza parlor is the front for a child-trafficking ring, and many people will believe it just because someone said it. Or a thoroughly disgraced physician can claim that vaccinations cause autism to the point where many Christian parents will refuse to let their kids be vaccinated. In my distant youth, the hot topic was fluoridation of the water since fluorine was obviously part of a Communist plot to destroy the brains of the American populace.

U. S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was until recently a firm believer in all the QANON conspiracy theories. When asked how she could have fallen for such obvious nonsense, her reply was that she had lost faith with the mainstream media and that had driven her to QANON. In other words, if you don't believe in one version of the truth, your only recourse is to go as far to the other extreme as you possibly can.

Getting back to religious groups, in the early years of Christianity there was a movement called the gnostics. It has been called the greatest threat to Christianity of that time. They infused Christian ideas with an esoteric, almost science-fiction view of the world that could only be totally entrusted to a few select enlightened people. Scientology is one current permutation of this approach to the truth, and its beliefs are even more bizarre than those of the gnostics. And yet it has a huge attraction to seemingly intelligent people who are attracted by its elitist appeal and promise of great material success in life. This last factor is no doubt responsible for most of the growth of the many mega-churches preaching the prosperity gospel, which is in direct opposition to most of the actual Gospel message.

Another “success story” is the growth of the LDS Church. At the time it was founded, it promised to provide all the answers to questions nagging at Christians in the 19^th century. Can we really trust the KJV translation? What is the special role of America in God's plans? How do native Americans and blacks fit in to God's plan of salvation?, etc. etc. This, coupled with a renewal of Satan's appeal to Adam and Eve that they could become like God, proved to be an irresistible draw to many. Today, with DNA findings totally demolishing the Mormon version of early American history, their only recourse is to say (as I have heard quoted), “You have to chose between faith and facts.”

Mormons are not the only ones who have felt that they need to turn off their brains in order to keep believing what they believe. Fundamentalists for a century now have continued to grasp at straws to defend their own interpretations of biblical accounts which are at odds with overwhelming evidence to the contrary from every branch of science. When my wife and I were back in high school, we were taught in church that dinosaur bones were either (a) planted by God to see if you would trust your own senses rather than God's word or (b) planted by Satan to lead you astray. I was told point-blank by one preacher that the only reason anyone would go into the sciences was because they wanted to disprove God.

For the most part, even conservative Christians now reject the old arguments put forth to defend their version of biblical truth, but there are still many who would prefer to chose their own “scientific experts” who in fact have little or no scientific credentials rather than admit that some of their biblical interpretations were in error, not the Bible itself. This illustrates another unfortunate thing about the quest for truth today. Once people get it in to their heads that a certain thing is true, it is almost impossible for any sort of logical argument or amassed body of truth to get them to admit that they might have been mistaken. Instead they will often go even further from the truth to try and justify themselves.

I could rant on and on, and already have. I get rather upset when I see the state of society in general and some Christians in particular in the way they approach the truth. But I must step back and try to put myself in their shoes. It helps me a little to consider why people are attracted to such perversions of the truth that they seem to have abandoned truth altogether, whether it be biblical, scientific, philosophical, or historical truth. Some of the common motives one can see in the examples above boil down to the need for people to regain or retain the power, material goods and respect they feel are slipping away from them in the face of a rapidly changing, diverse and increasingly technology-driven society. In addition, there is a sense of community that is missing in some of their lives, and so they are willing to embrace any group that promises to provide it, whatever the cost may be.