Truth, Facts and Faith

What Matters Most………Commentary by Jim High

My topic came to me as I read the thousands of posts on Facebook these days.  I find the time I spend on Facebook interesting, if not instructional.  But if you approach Facebook for what it is, the world’s largest conversation, then you can’t help but join in with your opinion on what is being said.  But here’s the rub, whose opinions are valid, whose are true, what is the truth and what are the actual facts of the matter being commented on.

You see in our present time we seem to have lost the ability to tell the difference between opinion, truth, facts, belief and faith.  In the old days long before television and 24-hour news channels and ownership of media outlets by big corporations, we got all our news mostly from the local newspaper.  I remember my Grandfather listening to the news on the radio in the evenings.   But it was mainly in the newspapers where people got their news.  We got three of them delivered to our house back then, Tupelo’s Daily Journal, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Memphis’s afternoon newspaper the Press-Scimitar.  If you wanted to “see” the news, the movie theater had the Movietone Newsreels along with cartoons before the movie.  Today some of our TV News appears like a cartoon, so confused have truth and facts become.

I’ve heard people say, “Well it’s true for me” or “My truth.”  There is no such thing as your truth.  If something is true it is true for everyone and in every case.  Truth is defined as the true or actual state of the matter or of existence, that which conforms with fact or reality, and a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, or principal.  A fact is defined as something that actually exists, something known to exist or to have happened, a truth known by actual experience or observation.  So while there is great overlap between the words truth and facts, neither word is subject to your private interpretation.  Both truth and facts are the same for everyone, even those on the opposite sides of a disagreement.  Opinions are not truth and neither are opinions factual, no matter how loud or often you say them.

How did we come to think otherwise?  Well when big corporations own a lot of newspapers all over the country the news becomes the same everywhere and very quickly it can become what the big corporation wants it to be.  It is even worse for television news.  We now have whole channels for conservative news and liberal news.  And they are not “Fair and Balance” no matter how many times they say it.

Then we have the situation where news today seems to always be presented as an argument between two opinions, not the facts or truth of the matter being reported.  Add in the Internet and Facebook, organizations pushing their agendas with advertising, and it can get difficult to know what the truth of the matter is and what the facts actually are.  Most people these days seem willing to just give up and go with the report that fits their opinion, but please remember that no one’s opinion is truth or a fact, unless it is supported by verifiable truth and actual facts.

Two quotes I saw recently are worth commenting on at this point.  In all the coverage about the new Pope, I heard a church official in Rome talking about the “truth of faith.”  What on earth did he mean?  There is no truth of faith.  Faith means you believe something without any truth or facts.

And the other quote was, “Doing the right thing is easy – knowing the right thing to do is difficult.”  But, if you always seek the truth and get the facts, you will know the right thing to do.

What Matters Most…….This quote from theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Karuss says it best.  “If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge.  A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not visa versa, whether or not we like the implications.”  

© 2013 #6  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467