Where Can I Find the Truth - I

Where Can I Find the Truth?

In the movie, A Few Good Men, The character played by Tom Cruise tells the character played by Jack Nicholson that he wants to know the truth. That’s not very true of most people. You can tell by how little people want to know the truth by how little they try to find out what the truth is. How many people believe in Evolution and yet have never taken 20 minutes to actually see whether there is real proof for their belief (There is none!) or what the argument is against it (See http://www.drdino.com/articles.php?spec=67 and http://www.icr.org/ )? How many people think that “separation of Church and State” means that there should be no religion in public and have actually researched what Thomas Jefferson actually meant when he wrote that to the Danbury Baptist Church (He was telling them that the State would not force people to follow a State-backed religion – like existed in many European Countries at that time and exist today in many Islamic nations)? People who believe things without ever doing any research are believing things blindly and there’s a good possibility that they are wrong about their beliefs but don’t even know it. At this point, we see that there are people who really don’t want to know the truth. They are happy to go along in their ignorance.

The biggest problem is that it is so hard to find the truth! We try to get our truth from school, books, science, newspapers and magazines, the Internet, and Governments. But we run into problems with all of these!

Let’s start with schools. First, we can take the point of Creation versus Evolution. Less than 100-years ago, schools never taught Evolution, even though it had been a theory for over 50 years. So did the truth change? Because now ONLY Evolution is taught and Creation is considered myth, fantasy. How do we know that schools won’t change again in a couple of years and begin teaching something else? This means that if you are going to school today, you would be learning that Evolution is the way life began. But if you were going to school 100 years ago, it was God. 100 years from now, it might be something else. Did the truth change? Did life all of a sudden come from something different? Or maybe it’s just that schools don’t know, so they tell us their best guess. The bottom line is that private schools will teach whatever will bring in the dollar and public schools will teach whatever the government says to teach. Neither are necessarily looking to teach the truth.

How about Books? We put so much faith in the written word. Just because it has been published, we think it means it is true. The US News and World Report from March 13, 2006 has an article written by Diana Cole called, “Publishing or Panic”. In it she relates how Oprah Winfrey devoted a whole segment of her show to rebuking “the truth-challenged” author of “A Million Little Pieces”, James Frey. Apparently, Oprah chose his book for her book club. However, thesmokinggun.com “exposed a laundry list of Frey’s embellishments and fabrications”. Cole continues to show how not only this episode, but others have hurt the reputation of book industry. She mentions also that “novelist JT Leroy was not the HIV-positive teenage male street hustler that readers had be led to believe – but 40-year –old mother Laura Albert. The acclaimed Indian writer known as Nasdijj was not of Navajo descent, as he had claimed but Timothy Patrick Barrus, an author of gay erotica.” The book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln is filled with poor research and fantasy posing as history. It is the book that Dan Brown has used as research to his book “The Da Vinci Code”. Textbooks, History books, Biographies – all have been known to be accidentally or purposely incorrect.

How about Scientists? In an article in the New York Times, Tuesday, December 20, 2005 titled, “Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud,” Lawrence K. Altman and William J. Broad write about the problems in the scientific research field. They relate the scandal with the South Korean scientist’s research regarding cloning and state that it is “just one sign of a global explosion in research that is out-stripping the mechanisms meant to guard against error and fraud.” They also state that, “Experts say the problem is only getting worse, as (the number of) research projects, and the journals that publish the findings, soar.” (Italics: mine). It goes on to state that scientific misconduct is increasing as research increases and surveys of the scientific community suggest that “there are powerful undercurrents of misbehavior, and in some cases, outright fakery.” It gives examples such as Dr. John R. Darsee, who was “found to have fabricated much data for more than 100 papers he wrote while working at Harvard and Emory Universities. His work appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The American Journal of Cardiology, among other top publications.” Other examples were work done by Bell Labs in 2002, Canadian research regarding the efficacy of a mix of multivitamins and an Indian study regarding heart disease and low-fat, high-fiber diets. And not only the New York Times, but others, such as the British Medical Journal, which has written several articles on “Suspicions of fraud in medical research: Who should investigate?”

And it’s good that there are other publications rather than just the New York Times, because you can’t trust the New York Times either! We know this first hand based on misquotes attributed to us in the article that featured our church. Anyone who comes to this church knows that the foundation of this church is Jesus Christ and his work on the cross – who he is and what he has done. We are taught that the way to salvation is through Jesus. We know that none of us are good enough to get to heaven on our own. We know that we all have sinned at some time in our lives. We know that God is righteous and when He judges us after our death, He will do what every good judge would do – sentence us because we are guilty. So we thank God He sent His son to take our punishment so that we can go free. We are honored to be able to build this church on the foundation of Jesus Christ because of what he has done for us.

So, to be quoted as saying that the foundation of this church is the Rapture, as the article claimed in its effort to make a point, is not only incorrect, but paints a poor picture of who we are. Other Christ-centered, God-loving Christians might read that and call us apostates - they could be using the New York Times article as evidence of what a bad church is! However, we know that it would be wrong and incorrect. But what is the word of a few Christians who actually attend the church against the New York Times!? In 100-years, we will be used by some pastor quoting the apostasy of our days. But not just The New York Times. Anyone see the movie “Shattered Glass”? It’s the true story of a writer named Steven Glass who wrote for the New Yorker Magazine. He became famous for breaking all these tremendously important stories. The problem was, he made everything up. It was all fabricated so he could gain fame. You obviously won’t find all the truth all the time in the New York Times, the New Yorker Magazine or any other newspaper or magazine.

How about Websites? There is a lot of good information on websites today. But there is just as much, maybe more, bad information. Everyone can create a website today. My son and daughter have websites. Our church has a website. This means you can get the truth from our church or find ten other sites that disagree with us in some manner. So who’s right? Unfortunately, it’s usually whichever site comes up highest in Google, Yahoo! or MSN. But we all know that this is not the way to determine truth. There is truth on websites, but you must learn which sites are credible. Otherwise you might find yourself reading the Jehovah’s Witnesses site and believing that the Son of God was actually the Archangel Michael! (Obviously not true!!!!!)

Well, thank God, He gave us Governments to rule – so now we know where we can get the truth from. NOT! Anyone who has ever watched Alias, 24 or X-Files knows that the government always lies! But forget about television. See Iran’s president’s speech last December. In it, he says that Israel should be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust was a myth. He says, “They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred…”

Which brings us to a new subject. There will always be people who try to change history – revisionist history – but it is too hard to do during the lifetime of those who witnessed and experienced it. The rejection of Iran’s president’s statement by the rest of the world is what happens to statements when everyone knows it is wrong. It is rejected by everyone who knows the truth, accepted by those who prefer their own truths (the Islamist Iranians) and will be lost to history until someone finds the statement again sometime in the future without the realization of it’s present-day rejection. This is reminiscent of what has happened with the Gnostic gospels, such as of Thomas, Judas and Mary.

So what we see is that there are many places we might go to find the truth, but we need to be careful because they are not always truthful – Books, newspapers, movies, science, governments – they all lie or don’t know the truth or embellish what they know until it isn’t truth anymore. Next week, we will discuss one final place that people go to learn the truth but need to be careful because they don’t always find it there – the Church!

To Be Continued…

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Last modified: April 30, 2006