I love to watch old Sci-fi movies, but they look so dated and corny now: how did anyone ever take them seriously? Perhaps they never did…

                              “WHAT IS TRUTH” by Russian painter Nikolai Ge (1831–1894)
Perhaps the answer lies partly in the fact that people of that time-say, the fifties-were so willing to enter into the story that they overlooked weaknesses in the plots, the sets and the acting. In fact, we do the same thing now, don’t we? Yes, the sets, the effects etc. are much more realistic, but any time we watch a film-even if it’s a true story-we’re intentionally believing something which isn’t real. In thirty years the films we love now will look dated and we’ll wonder why we enjoyed them so much.
E=MC2, or 3, or 5…PERHAPS…
Our willingness to believe things which in our heart of hearts we know are untrue or which we can’t substantiate is manifested in many ways. A science teacher not a million miles away from where I live told his class that there’s no such thing as truth in any absolute sense. You need to find your own truth, he said. If the students had applied that little nugget of advice in their exams many of them would have failed.

“There is no God”, he said boldly. Was he absolutely sure about that? Is that really a scientific statement, or is it philosophical? Who “proved” that there is no God?
Over a period of several months this self-styled warrior of truth (his own) was clearly attempting to turn his captive audience away from the faith and standards that many of their parents had worked diligently for years to bestow on them. By the end of the school year he’d worked up to his grand finale, his ultimate sermon: the beauty of Buddhism, and how they should all look into it.

“…it will throw truth to the ground…” (Daniel 8:12 ESV)

ESTABLISHMENT CLAWS (yes I did mean to spell it that way)
Of course, the common and contemporary wails of “separation of church and state” echoing around the nation only get applied to Christian beliefs: they don’t get applied or even considered when the argument and the discussion is against that same God, or for, say, Islam, even if the teacher is wasting the students’ learning time by talking philosophy rather than the science he’s being paid tax-payers’ money to teach. And this is just a miniscule part of the nation-wide, nay, the world-wide effort underway to stamp out all vestiges of Christian faith, to radically revise the last two thousand years of history, to totally alter our perception of truth, and to usher in a brave new world: a utopia in which boys and girls use the same toilets whether they want to or not, where babies by the million are denied the right to live, and where more people get married but separate a lot sooner.
Utopia! The word isn’t used anymore, I know. It’s worn out, old, cliched, and discredited. But make no mistake, the dream is the same, and it represents the belief that humanity is the competent commander of his own destiny. The word means, by the way, “no place”…perhaps one reason for its loss of favor.
“I’M NOT A NUMBER, I’M A FREE MAN!” (Number 6)
(Oh Patrick, you were such a male chauvenist!)
You may notice I used two more out-dated terms above: “boys” and “girls”. No, I don’t mean to agree that they’re out-dated: my sons are “boys”, and I praise the Lord for that. But if certain people have their way, not only will our boys and girls all be using the same toilets and the same locker rooms (they already are in some places), but anyone labeling people “boys” or “girls”, “men” or “women” will find themselves being sued by those who are so “loving” and “fair” that they’ll put you in jail and out of business for disagreeing with them, or even for refusing to bake a cake (oh I forgot, that’s already happened). Aaah! How loving these people are! They put us Christians to shame, don’t they!
Am I exaggerating? Consider newly updated anti-discrimination laws in New York (December 2015) where business owners can be fined up to $250,000 for miss-assigning a transgender person’s name:
The NYCHRL requires employers and covered entities to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification. Most individuals and many transgender people use female or male pronouns and titles.
Other violations of the law include refusing to allow individuals to use single-sex facilities such as bathrooms that are “consistent with their gender identity” (NOTE 2)
You “won’t be fined for accidentally using the wrong pronoun”  in a private setting, defenders of the law claim. Let’s wait and see how true that statement is.
WHAT DO WE WANT?
I’ve written before about how we humans choose what we want to believe rather than hunting for truth. One answer to this assertion is that nobody can know what real truth is…therefore there’s probably no truth to be identified or found… therefore let’s just make up our own! That way, we’ll all be happy, right?

This kind of humanistic reasoning assumes that plurality can work, just so long as we all agree that other peoples’ “truth” is as valid as our own. Good luck with that one. And down we all go, in the direction of the lowest common denominator, or of the ideology with the biggest gun.

It’s about as logical as saying that two-plus-two is whatever you want it to be. The only “two plus two” theory not acceptable in this thought-economy is the Christian one.

It’s about as logical as saying that four different opinions of the color of the President’s hair can all be true: one says it’s red, another says it’s black, another says its blond, and another says it’s brown. Are they really all right? Is it true that the President’s hair is red and black and blond and brown?
There are people who would doggedly insist that yes, his hair is all those colors: “it’s just a matter of perception”, or “it’s just a matter of differing light frequencies making things appear to have certain colors”, or “how dare you be so judgmental!”
In the determination to avoid making a decision about certain things in this spaghetti of post-modern society, we’re denying our own intelligence, we’re distorting the art of logic, and we’re threatening to conclude that nothing, not even the power of reason, has any meaning except what we decide to give it. We’re replacing it all with gobbledygook, just for the sake of making a political or philosophical point-or rather, to avoid one. In fact I’ll go further than that: we’re replacing it all in order to avoid seeing “the elephant in the room”: the aspect of life, the universe and everything, the aspect of God and his creation which is eventually unavoidable: there is such a thing as Truth…whether you like it or not.

WHAT IS TRUTH?
After Jesus Christ was condemned to die he was questionned by Pilate, the governor of Judea. He told Pilate:
“Everyone on the side of truth listens to me”.
Pilate replied, cynically,
“What is truth?” (John 18:37-38 NIV).
Our once-solidly grounded society, imperfect as it was, has descended to the philosophical confusion of the Roman Empire. If Pilate had really been interested in knowing what truth is, he would have at least considered the words of Jesus, who said:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the light. No man comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
NOTES
1: Nikolai Ge (1831–1894).
2: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/27/nyc-will-fine-you-250000-for-misgendering-a-transsexual/

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