Flawed Glass

                 A recent article suggests the term, “post truth”, as a description of today’s culture. Its point is not that truth no longer exists, but that it has grown irrelevant. There is a general apathy about truth. It has succumbed to a constant wash of opinion. By the 19 th century the Enlightenment had authenticated scientific inquiry. Some authorities in the church saw science as a threat to their power, which they sustained in large measure by keeping the common people illiterate and pliable. Free thinking might lead to questions of their authority, so a vigorous science-versus-the-Bible dogma emerged. Part of the backlash against enlightenment thinking was manifest in the Second Great Awakening, a neo-Calvinist/neo-Puritan movement. Unlike the First Great Awakening's focus on predestination, the Second Great Awakening was a quasi-enlightenment movement that emphasized free will and individual responsibility for sal...

It is said that knowledge is power. I have long felt that humanity is a species of control freaks. In my observation, most human problems reflect some kind of struggle for power and control. If there is “original sin,” it may be the obsession over control. In the Genesis account, Adam and Eve were tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of (wait for it) the knowledge of good and evil. “If I know the difference, then I can be in control of my destiny!” (which would make me “like God,” according to the tempter ~ Genesis 3:5). Ancient cultures believed that to know the name of a person or a phenomenon was to have power over him/her/it. When Jesus confronted the possessed man in Gerasa (Mark 5), he asked the man—or more to the point, he asked the spirit that possessed the man, “What is your name?” If a physician knows the name of a disease or condition, she has the ability (power) to treat it. There is a modicum of control over the malady. All of the above is why precise termino...