Truth – what the heck is truth? The definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “the real facts about something.” Geez, that is helpful. Ask anyone about the real facts about the Veteran’s Administration scandal, Benghazi, or even older scandals such as Iran-Contra or the Gulf Oil Spill, and all you get is political spin. Maybe it is because all of those things are just so political. Nowadays, I don’t have a good feel for what is NOT political!
Try asking someone about some seemingly uncontroversial subject like global warming. Hmmm. How about something simple, like the number of people who have signed up for the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka “Obamacare”)? We can’t even get the ground truth in our own elections. Even in this high technological age, it seems an uncontroversial “truth” that both the voter rolls and actual voting are skewed. That makes me a little nervous when we declare a “true” winner.
Recently, some long-held human “truths” have been called into question. For centuries it has been true that marriage was a union between a man and a woman. No more. It used to be true that certain body parts provided the true definition of the gender of an individual. Now even that is now subject to interpretation. You can hardly tell any more someone’s gender by the person’s clothing!
No wonder why our kids are so screwed up. They don’t know what to believe. We have created a sense that truth is only what we say it is. Truth, now, is true only in the eye of the beholder. I’ve heard this described as relativism. As Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, stated years ago, “we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.” Among other things, this leads to a denial of absolute truth which leads to moral license to do anything one desires.
This is a problem not only for its lack of a foundation for people to build their lives on. It is a problem for society at large. We still by and large agree in the truth that murder is bad. Yet in reality, it depends upon the context. American society seems to bend that truth when it comes to abortion, capital punishment, and even physician-assisted suicide. Other societies have other similarly skewed rules. In some Muslim societies, it is okay, even honorable, to murder an infidel. If a woman commits adultery in that society, she too may be killed.
Maybe I am getting old, but I, for one, reject the idea of skewed truth. No, I do not see everything in black and white, but there are certain principles that I believe are universal and everlasting. Most of those are the ones espoused by our country’s founders in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Those include the ideas of natural law, certain rights inherent in humankind, subservience to a benevolent creator, and the fact that this country was blessed by that creator with liberty.
Unfortunately, that blessing of liberty depends upon certain truths and principles. To paraphrase the words of Benjamin Franklin, to keep the blessing of liberty, we must adhere to the truths and principles upon which this nation was founded.
