Living in a Parallel Universe What a week this has been. First, Raphael Warnock became the first black, and John Ossoff the first Jewish, men from Georgia to be elected to the United States Senate. Then, a mob, egged on by our president, broke into the Capitol building, thinking they had the power to stop the certification of the electoral college vote because Trump incorrectly implied that they did. Normally a routine ceremony, the certification was turned into a tedious farce by a few elected officials who chose to challenge the vote. They defended their actions by parroting the baseless claims of election fraud Trump has spouted for months, in…
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Truth and Our America
The Question of Truth Does such a thing as truth exist? If so, how do we define it? Is it relative, dependent on culture or worldview, making one truth as good as another? Can truth guide how we live and work and respond to the chaos overwhelming the United States today? The topic is huge. To explore it in depth would take a book. But there are some simple ideas we can look at. For instance, Michael Glanzberg, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, notes that philosophers have devised many ways of understanding how we know truth from falsehood. One way is to use the correspondence theory of truth.…
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Opinion, Fact, and Truth
Truth from Out of the Void At a Recovery Church circle a few months ago, someone asked, “What is truth?” “Truth is core; it’s how everything starts,” came the first answer. According to the Hebrew Scriptures, everything started with chaos. Over the deep spread “a formless void and darkness” (Gen 1:2). That chaotic vastness still thrums in the background of space. [1] Like the swirl of emotions that allows us to nurture bonds and love our children, this primal music is part of our being. We are stardust; we are the incipient chaos. Does truth reside in that wildness, in those feelings? Vital and compelling, they can lead us to…