The Primacy of Truth

We live in a society that no longer recognizes the underlying principles that human beings ought to honor and base their lives on. That sounds pretty extreme in a society that doesn't seem to honor anything, but that's just the point. We're created a world were virtue has no meaning, where achievement is showing up, where criticism is demonized as bigotry and were lies are commonly advanced as wisdom.

How did this happen?  I've lived through it.  I was a boy in the 1950s.  People weren't afraid of their shadows in those days.  We carried pocket knives, shot guns, played with liquid mercury, raked leaves and burned them on the side of the road, routinely set off fireworks and firecrackers and cherry bombs on fourth of July, played pick up baseball far from home having driven our own bikes to the location without any parental guidance.  Now pretty much all of those things are either forbidden or supervised.  That's crazy.

But what is worse is what we allow.  Now killing babies is seen as a right.  Doing drugs is increasingly accepted.  Perversion (well that's what we called it and I don't think it has changed) is now supposed to be accepted and even celebrated.  Lunacy like transgenderism was mostly not even conceived of when I was a kid.  Now it seems as if people think it is a right to decide for yourself what your sex is.  These things are signs not of progress or enlightenment but of sheer lunacy.

The problem is that we'd lost touch with truth.  Truth is simply what we say of a statement when it conforms to reality.  What is true is also what is real.  It's quite popular today to see truth as relative, which is a rather odd idea since the notion that truth is relative really means that truth is merely a matter of opinion so on that supposition nothing is real.  I guess a pop-tart real is a gun or a disassembled clock really is a bomb, oh wait, back that one up ... but you get the idea nothing is what it is but only what someone says it is.  The problem is that that is not true.

I'm reading a book by a guy named Tom Holland titled In The Shadow of the Sword.  I only mention this because is talking about the early history of Persia he talks about Zoroastrianism which is a dualistic religious view that, to quote a passage on page 91:

"The rise and fall of earthly empires were the mere shadow play of something infinitely more cosmic: the clash between Truth and the Lie."

That passage made me think of other cosmic dichotomies: Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, the Beginning and the End, Life and Death, Right and Wrong, the Microcosm and the Macrocosm, God and Satan.

I tend to think I am watching the death of the West.  Another name for the West until a few hundred years ago was Christendom.  At the time of the Reformation and the Enlightenment the West was shattered although it didn't look that way and many of its great achievements were yet to come.  But now as moral decadence obscures the truth we see the West sinking.  The Demographics says that Europe will be Islamic in a few decades if the birthrates continue as they are now.  Should the West not be restored to its ancient and historic commitment to truth it looks very much as if it will be gone and a great Lie which emerged from the desert long ago will stand victorious in its place.