Many Shades of Truth...Or Are There?

The notion of Truth has been purposely eroded and manipulated so that people can believe anything they want to believe without consequence or responsibility for their choice. But Truth doesn't work that way.

There is such a thing as Absolute Truth in this reality.

Sound bites of relative truth controlled by spin doctors to represent 'the truth of the day' for purposes of control or confusion don't count. The effects of pursuing 'truth' seen through ideology, bias, ignorance, laziness or aims of its adherents include oppression, corruption, and scarcity so men stay weak and poor and many die. 

The sad part is, we all have a 'gut feeling' of what that absolute truth is. There is also a body of wisdom literature transcending time, culture, and geography that helps serve as reference points. It just has become more convenient to make truth something that fits the moment so we can feel justified in our actions or non-actions or gratuitous self-satisfaction.

Societies and Cultures need Truth. Without truth, we don’t have trust. Without trust, we don’t have rule of law. Without the rule of law, we don’t have democracy or other forms of order and equity that makes a society committed to being civil.

It was the fascists who said, "Everyday life doesn’t matter. Every detail doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter. All that matters is the message, the leader, the myth, the totality." We should be remembering the world destabilization such thinking those messages and that leadership brought to the 1920s-1940s. That's absolute truth.

The Storytellers

Denial, or even the more subtle version of it, i.e., “planting doubt,” whether about wiretapping, terrorist threats from other peoples, Jewish or other genocides, crowd size at an inauguration, etc., is a perpetuation of the kind of fascism and hatred used to foment social divide.

As the South Africans so brilliantly taught us with their Truth and Reconciliation Commission, full closure and moving forward into a new, more humane place requires first acknowledging--sometimes ugly--truths of our culture, history or past.

Thankfully, when governments fail to do so, the Storytellers keep the truth and the lessons of history alive for us to remember or to explore with contemporary perspective. And that is exactly why #45 doesn't like Hollywood, the Arts or the Media.

Postscript: fascism is a nationalistic attitude essentially hostile to the principles of democracy, fundamental rights and freedoms, and the rule of law. At the same time, it irrationally exalts a particular community, such that people outside it are systematically excluded and discriminated against.

This attitude permeates the ideology, the thinking, the activity, and the aims of its adherents.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"

 

This story headline was recently posted on Facebook. The story is about a judge who recently struck down a case regarding the religious wording on US currency. Respondents to the Facebook posting unanimously agreed to the question in the headline, "Do you agree?" (that these words should be on our money). 

This is a dissenting opinion:

The original coinage minted by the United States never carried a religious motto. Interestingly, "MIND YOUR BUSINESS" (from Benjamin Franklin) appeared as the first motto. The first American coinage was totally secular; as clean from a mention of God as the Constitution.

The religious community in America grew.  Several Protestant denominations organized the National Reform Association that formalized their desire to transform America into a Christian state.  Their aim was to amend the Constitution and "declare the nation's allegiance to Jesus Christ" by making "Christian laws" the "legal basis" for laws of the land.

The Association failed in its attempt to amend the Constitution, but continued its efforts:

• The Act of 1865 gave the authority to place "IN GOD WE TRUST" on coins.

• In 1908 Congress ignored the concept of state/church separation and approved a bill to make the use of the motto "IN GOD WE TRUST" a requirement of law.

• In 1956, during the Christian, anti-Communist fervor of McCarthyism, Congress passed a bill establishing "IN GOD WE TRUST" as a national motto.

Today the religious motto is found on all USA paper money and coinage, none of which appeared on our Founding Fathers' currency. The irony cannot be lost here that Christians suggest love of money as the "root of all evil" (1 Tim. 6:10).

More to the point, the Founding Fathers, through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, created a secular federal government that would treat religion neutrally and impartially. God, religion, and sectarianism, while adopted by the majority of citizens of the United States, would be kept out of government by law. The reason was simple and well understood by every educated and informed individual: religions and sectarianism appealed to a person's passions and emotions, not to one's intellect and logical faculties, and so were inimical to, and corruptible of, a secular government based on reason and the rule of law.

Very simply, the Founding Fathers thought that freedom of conscience and expression should be allowed and protected by law, not that the law include a preferential belief in a specific religion, theology, philosophy, or ideology.

Every constitutional scholar will tell you that "In God We Trust " and "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, and each will also tell you that it won't be removed. They are America's little hypocrisy...

Religion and God are not the Same Thing

Religion and God are not the same thing. One exists to control humans and make money off them. The real ‘God’ only seeks to make men wise.  Religion makes you think you understand God so you think you can control how life will turn out if you follow the ‘right’ path.  But religion only represent someone’s depiction of THEIR God. 

We are here to LEARN to love our neighbors. To achieve oneness of mind, a sameness in understanding of life experiences for all humankind.

We are here to slowly eliminate all differences between one person and another--it cannot be done in one lifetime.

Seeing is not believing. "To the authentic all things are untainted and have beauty. But to those who are cynical or closed-minded, nothing is genuine. Their mind and conscience are spoiled with distrust" (Titus 1:15).

Children are adorable because we love to see the beauty of their innocence. But on the trip to adulthood the way a person looks at life and the world is altered. With maturity, people become distrustful, sophisticated, competitive, cosmopolitan, cynical, suspicious, sarcastic, prejudiced, self-centered, and uninvolved. It all drives people apart and creates fear, not adulthood. That is not God-like.

Transformations of any kind (to adulthood, from adversity, to success, etc.), are not accomplished by our effort to get ahead in life, but by the Spirit in us.  The world doesn’t understand that when we stop thinking success is our own doing, and begin to sense the interdependence and collective conscience in us right now, we behold the miracles, or “successes” all around. That IS God-like.

Poverty and Education in Developing and Developed Countries: Being More Educated Doesn’t Make You Less Poor

Educators, those in international and domestic development, and many others (there are plenty), commonly say that we can’t solve poverty until we solve education.

To be clear, let’s distinguish between three claims:

·         

      Education is A Way to end poverty;

·        Education is The Best Way to end poverty;

·        Education is The Only Way to end poverty.

All are false, but since number three is what the education reform crowd pushes, let’s start there.  It is simply inaccurate that to end poverty you need to alter education.  Americans already know this.  Starting from the 1960s, we as a society, cut outrageously high rates of elderly poverty by 71%.  We did that by sending old people checks called Social Security.  We also know from international data that low-poverty countries get that way through tax and transfer schemes just like Social Security and that high poverty countries get that way from tax and transfer schemes just the opposite of Social Security.

So, those that say nothing but education will dramatically cut poverty, when things other than education absolutely will, and have, only add to a discursive world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut poverty.  You are a bad person.

Claim #1, that education is a way to reduce poverty. In fact, we have dramatically ramped up educational attainment in the US in the last forty years or so and poverty has not taken a dive.

The basic logic goes something like: being more educated doesn’t make you less poor--having more money makes you less poor.  Even if you think education is necessary, it is not sufficient to end poverty.  You need distributive institutions that actually generate a specific distributive result.  Education is certainly not sufficient for ensuring that happens. A more educated populace will probably be more productive, but that too—as we have seen for the last four decades—is not sufficient for ensuring the gains of such productivity increases flow to the non-rich.  Education is good, but sufficient for solving poverty it is not.

Claim #2, that education is the best way to reduce poverty.  Since education is not even sufficient for reducing poverty, it certainly can’t be the BEST way to reduce poverty.  But even if it were sufficient for reducing poverty, all of the international and domestic evidence we have indicates that the best way to cut poverty in a rich, developed country is to simply change the distribution of income in society.  It’s not hard.  If the pre-tax distribution of income is no good (and it isn’t), you just tax and transfer money around.  That is the proven way to dramatically cut poverty.  It is surely the best way to do so, not education.

It is not clear if education reformers are stupid, riddled with ideology, or just trying to make their projects seem grander than they are.  But when they say you can’t solve poverty without education, they are wrong, wrong, wrong.  If they don’t stop saying it, they should rightly be understood as antagonistic to the interests of poor people.

Turning Tides...A Personal Reflection About Life

As an oceanographer by training, it seemed like a natural extension of a professional career surrounded by oceans, that retiring would naturally be near water and a beach, preferably a Caribbean island. Well, how does the expression go? “Watch what you wish for, it may come true.”  I made it. I landed on that beach.

But age, wisdom, sore bones and other stuff that goes along with getting old caught up with my visions of endless summers, surfing, wild days and nights of youth (but with money to enjoy more excesses) and a long bucket list of things still needed to do.

What happened when landing on this beach is different than I expected. It became a time to think instead of playing, extending my professional career, texting, watching TV, socializing or consuming.

It became a time of reflections. Sometimes those thoughts were “Woulda’s, Coulda’s, and Shoulda’s.”  But I tried to stay more positive in these thoughts because travel was fatal to my prejudices, bigotry and narrow-mindedness acquired by only vegetating in a little corner of this Earth.

The summary below is part of that thinking.  Life is good. It is precious. Even more precious than I thought about for the last 60-some years.  No more time to waste or use casually.

And now, I’ve landed on this beach
That took some sixty years to reach
As this generation of mine
is ordered to life’s front line

Reluctantly we roam this beach
Advancing to fill up the breach
Created by that fallen corps
Of elders that were here before
While we enjoyed our middle age

We knew, before we found this beach
The enemy that we besiege
Has ammunition for us all
Not one will manage to survive
No one leaves this beach alive

For those arriving on this beach
There is no prayer to pray or preach
Since we’ve outlived dying young
And for surviving, in exchange
Now face life at point blank range

What we witness on this beach
Has but one lesson for to teach
Here the carnage never stops
Everyday another drops
Some classmate, relative, or friend
Is attacked to abrupt end

So on into the breach my peers
Who knows how many weeks or years
Remain ‘til you and I are hit
As we inch onward bit by bit
We only know our lives will bleach
Eternally out on this beach