Does Truth Matters

Reader Digest's wrote several list on April Fool's Prank that reader can start to pull. One of them is this. Gabi Mortorel, a lecturer upload a link called, "Final exam answers". When his students clicked the link, suddenly one video appear. Well, it is a video of pop-rock artist singing a song entitled Never give you Up. There are no final exam answers whatsoever provided in the link. learning from distance (online class) can be quite challenging and nerve-racking. That is why, the lecturer fooled his student in order to make his student feel motivated and of course to enjoy the excitement that April's fools bring, once a year. Interesting as it is, if we take away the April Fool's context, what's the boundaries we can set so that so our action of fooling does not violate truth and distort truth? However, this kind of question already had an hidden assumption that truth is valuable. Why bother asking questions of boundaries in relation to truth if there is no thing called truth whatsoever? 

Truth is so deep. Not many are like to talk about it. Thinker like Tarski mentioned on how we can only understand truth by using meta-language, our ordinary language fail in describing what truth is all about. Yet at the same time, no richer language we can use, except our ordinary usage of language. No wonder, people try to define truth in a very narrow way. The easiest road to take is to define truth in line with their feeling. In addition, this approach will hinder the discussion of truth from any metaphysical ground, the things that people in today culture really avoid. Nietzsche echoes the culture sentiment with his own word, "belief in God sustains weakness". To say do not murder is actually wrong means by today culture as N.T Wright pointed out, "i do not like murder". Or giving charity is good, which means, "I like charity." Truth is has became a matter of like and dislike.

Regarding truth, there was a very famous saying from Winston Churchill he says, "truth is so precious that she always be attended by the bodyguard of lies." Fascinating statement. Yes, most people will agree that truth is precious. However, not all the people will agree that truth is precious especially for pragmatics. If truth does not work, then it has no value. Thus, the need of truth is crucial in our world today especially, amid the propaganda of mass media owned by some high rank people, there is a real threat to annihilate truth. Lies are their favorite weapon to enforce the agenda of their own political tribe. With an action we called as "power-play". The result is " truth-decay", and it is characterized by declining trust over reliable source, and a blurring line between opinion and fact. Everything can be equally valid.

Years ago Daniel Boorstin, an American historian mentioned this bleak condition of our time by saying that "truth" has been displaced by "Believability". As long as we can create some alternative facts, who cares about the true facts anyway. Whatever works, whatever bring surplus, that's the facts we all needed. One author mentioned on how we have been so used to lie, as we lie and lied to on a regular basis. Start from a simple utterance such as, "I like Sushi" to "I love You". Interesting. If that is true and if we lies in daily basis, why we are shocked when the political leader use the similar act of lying? We can conclude that the fact of the matter is, we often demand truth from the lips of others more harshly compare to the truth that should comes from our own mouth. Unfair as it might seems but that's the dreadful reality. 

Honestly, the antidote of this chaos isn't that simple as one can imagine. Truth is personalized up to the point, truth is become whatever we like, a preferences. Truth is depend on our mood at the given day. If that so, how to weight the truth from two contradictory statements that are believed as truth? Do we measure which feeling are stronger to determine which statements are true and which are not? Further problem and complexity, how we are able to do the measurement? No thoughtful people will agree that truth is equal to just feeling. Something cannot be called as true, only because we like it, utter Carl Sagan. 

Ironically, Abdu Murray in his book Saving Truth mentioned on how Christian could also play and contribute a part in this era called-post Truth, if they fell into the seductions of post-truth. There are two common seductions. First seduction, to make gospel like a pill, to make the gospel easier and avoid the uncomfortable and sensitive discussions regarding truth, and contextualize gospel in such away just to make Gospel likable. Second seduction, Christian create a fence and destroy the bridge of relationship and thus, make the church so unwelcoming. No wonder as Murray point it out, "If the gospel message of compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation is proclaimed by those who seem to have none of those qualities, it's hard to see how the broader culture's respond can be anything but concomitant, dismay and anger." Well, he get it right.  Today people are convinced with the message through the integrity of the messenger, aren't they?

Truth does matter. Without truth there is no ground for rationality. Without truth, there is only endless battle between ego and power down the road as Orwell said in his time, truth becoming untruth in the side of  enemy. Both truth and untruth are becoming ontologically situational. This is so terrible. We can predict the troubling impact of sacrificing truth and playing lies from the experience of relationship. All kind of relationship demand truth. As reality tells us, lies destroy the relationship rather than save the relationship. No relationship can evet survive with lies. When someone promote lies, they are going to break and destroy something in no time.

Today, Christian need to play their part more eagerly. To once again present the truth that is not airy fairy and abstract, grounded not in feeling put in Person, Jesus Christ in this post-truth world. One practical way is to show how groundless the truth based on feeling, and how actually is impossible for people to say anything about moral, dignity, justice and so on apart from the firm transcendent ground. 

The other way is to show how actually the live after we owned the Truth of God is more beautiful and satisfying than what we get outside the ultimate ground of truth as Sam Chan says, "We must demonstrate  to our friends that the gospel is more imaginable and more beautiful than they realized." This is a powerful approach today because living testimonies deals with feeling and experiences of people. Most importantly, Christian should not spread lies hinder deception and misrepresentation and be truthful as much as possible. Otherwise we cannot offer solution if we are part of the problem. 

The greatest apologetics is to live out the gospel through the real example of our godly lives, it touches their heart and feeling, and willing to shape the culture in a very noble way. Jonathan Edward shown this example in his sermon whereby he presented the beauty of Christ and used an imaginary that can help unbelievers to see that Christ is beautiful. C. S Lewis also helps people from the path of imagination. Gave his reader reasons that God in Christian faith to satisfies better than anything in the world would. If the classical apologetics deal from head to heart. Today apologetics can start from heart to head. Myron Bradley Penner has mentioned this idea of embodied testimony in his proactive work, The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Post Modern context. His chapter on the Politics of Witness is worth reading. In the book, Myron argue for the case of "ethics of belief" and not merely an "epistemology of belief". Apologetics in essential is a spiritual activity and expression of true faith, with the means of love. It is not only about the content of faith, our attitude and passions does matters!