Start The Obituary; Our Culture Is Committing Suicide
I was going to write on the death of truth.
Looking around, it seems to be nearing the end. We are called bigots for saying a man cannot become a woman. We are told it’s not scientific to consider a six-week-old unborn child a person. We hear that it’s possible for men to have periods and get pregnant, and it’s normal for women to have penises and grow beards.
“Truth” can be whatever we want it to be--well it can be whatever the Party wants it to be, even if it clearly contradicts our understanding of reality. In the words of the timeless novelist George Orwell, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
We don’t have a one-party state, as in Orwell’s 1984, telling us what to think and believe--telling us what’s true. But we do have a culture led by elites in institutions, Hollywood, and academia who are similarly telling us that our beliefs and understanding of the most basic truths aren’t all that true.
Rather, “truth” is redefined to fit a narrative and advance a worldview. Orwell writes:
It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you -- something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
Our modern elites’ worldview is so enamored by the standard of doing whatever makes us most happy—it is so controlled by subjective experience—that it is no longer concerned with objective truth. Surely, truth’s death is upon us. Or so it seems.
I thought about getting creative and writing an obituary for our old friend truth, but then I thought more about the statement “the death of truth.”
Ironically, that statement cannot be true.
Truth does not die.
Truth does not cease to exist when people don’t accept it just as oxygen would not vanish if everyone chose not to breathe.
Truth cannot die because it is fully personified in Jesus Christ who lives forever. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he tells us. “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
For truth to die would mean our Savior never resurrected, never conquered death, and will never fulfill his promises to us. We know truth will live forever, even when our culture disdains it, because Christ lives forever and will always exemplify it.
Truth, like oxygen, will always exist. It’s we, who choose to stop pursuing truth, who choose to stop breathing oxygen, who will die.
In reality, our culture is not killing truth. It’s killing itself.
I should be writing our obituary.