Fake news is one of the talks of the day, and I would avoid it except that I know someone - let's keep his name out of it - who actually fell for the Pizzagate troll that brought another young man up from North Carolina to check it out - with a gun. In short, the story claims that the Clintons are running a child sex opperation out of a Washington, DC pizzeria. The young man I know who took it seriously is, for one thing, young and, like many his age, has been pulled into the conspiracy theories that infest the internet. This one, I explained to him, was just plain stupid. Whether about money or sex, the Clintons have plenty of both and can get more in less heinous ways anytime they want. To expose themselves to that kind of slimminess would be far, far stupider (and infinately more immoral) than an inappropriate, but consensual tryst in the Oval Office.
But the question remains - where to make the cut? Face Book, if I read it right, has some kind of system where they can "fingerprint" fake news and keep it off the internet. How that works I don't know, but it does raise the question of surpressment of information. For instance, I saw this report about fake news on one of the major media TV networks, yet, wasn't it Dan Rather who had fake news on W Bush concerning his enlistment in the National Guard? And wasn't it Rather himself who said, well, THIS copy may be fake, but I know it is true? But how, Mr. Rather, how?
Who, then, is the arbitor of "real" news? Who can we trust? Might this expose, for instance, simply be a way that some news sources have of making themselves look more legitimate than others?
We are all looking for the truth behind the curtain, where it most often seems to be. But if objective truth - that is, living, breathing
facts in the real world of gravity and death - is difficult to ferret out, how about "news" of God, of the hereafter, of anyhing in the spiritual realm? It doesn't make it any easier for a Christian (to take what I know about best) to believe when their leader says, after proving to Doubting Thomas his substance after rising from the dead, "how much greater are those who believe without seeing." Well, sure, faith is good. But that was also demanded by homicidal nut cases from Waco, Tx, to Jonestown, Guyana. What makes Jesus - or Mosses or Siddhartha - any more believable than the others? Where is the unaltered document that proves that what they have said is true?
To say that this has already been addressed by theologians is an understatement. For my own two cents, I will say that spiritual truth differs from the newspaper kind. While it is taken from the real world of prophets, gurus and ancient history, it is not meant to reside there. It is meant to penetrate the person at a deeper and more personal level, to what has been refered to as the soul or the heart. It is only here that it, the information, can be coroborated. Just like science, it is an experimental field, but it cannot really be disseminated as scientific fact (which also sometimes proves to be wrong) because the experiment must take place inside the "spiritual scientist." Each and every one of us must substantiate scripture by allowing it to penetrate to the depths it was intended. If it does not show us its affects, we can either have faith in others who we trust and have experienced its truth, or we can turn elsewhere - which might only be inwards on ourselves.
In the end, spiritual knowledge requires a greater sort of maturity than newspaper or scientific knowledge. While we trust others to give us hard-earth truth - or we don't, and perhaps spiral off into the absurd - for spiritual truth (for the skeptics and scientists among us), we can only confirm it by practicing one of its disciplines. We must ultimately determine what is fake or not, not CBS or Fox News. In the end, spiritual knowledge poses a far bigger challenge than earthly truths, but we are all made to do it if we really want to. So, trust in others for your faith, as you would, say, Stephen Hawkins for physics, or do it yourself (for unlike Hawkings and his math genius, we all have spiritual genius). It is really that simple, and no less confusing or "false" than when we put our faith in the daily news. Excpet that with spiritual news, we can know, for sure, if we really want to. It is all there, a package that is hard to unwrap but more than eager to be opened. FK
But the question remains - where to make the cut? Face Book, if I read it right, has some kind of system where they can "fingerprint" fake news and keep it off the internet. How that works I don't know, but it does raise the question of surpressment of information. For instance, I saw this report about fake news on one of the major media TV networks, yet, wasn't it Dan Rather who had fake news on W Bush concerning his enlistment in the National Guard? And wasn't it Rather himself who said, well, THIS copy may be fake, but I know it is true? But how, Mr. Rather, how?
Who, then, is the arbitor of "real" news? Who can we trust? Might this expose, for instance, simply be a way that some news sources have of making themselves look more legitimate than others?
We are all looking for the truth behind the curtain, where it most often seems to be. But if objective truth - that is, living, breathing
facts in the real world of gravity and death - is difficult to ferret out, how about "news" of God, of the hereafter, of anyhing in the spiritual realm? It doesn't make it any easier for a Christian (to take what I know about best) to believe when their leader says, after proving to Doubting Thomas his substance after rising from the dead, "how much greater are those who believe without seeing." Well, sure, faith is good. But that was also demanded by homicidal nut cases from Waco, Tx, to Jonestown, Guyana. What makes Jesus - or Mosses or Siddhartha - any more believable than the others? Where is the unaltered document that proves that what they have said is true?
To say that this has already been addressed by theologians is an understatement. For my own two cents, I will say that spiritual truth differs from the newspaper kind. While it is taken from the real world of prophets, gurus and ancient history, it is not meant to reside there. It is meant to penetrate the person at a deeper and more personal level, to what has been refered to as the soul or the heart. It is only here that it, the information, can be coroborated. Just like science, it is an experimental field, but it cannot really be disseminated as scientific fact (which also sometimes proves to be wrong) because the experiment must take place inside the "spiritual scientist." Each and every one of us must substantiate scripture by allowing it to penetrate to the depths it was intended. If it does not show us its affects, we can either have faith in others who we trust and have experienced its truth, or we can turn elsewhere - which might only be inwards on ourselves.
In the end, spiritual knowledge requires a greater sort of maturity than newspaper or scientific knowledge. While we trust others to give us hard-earth truth - or we don't, and perhaps spiral off into the absurd - for spiritual truth (for the skeptics and scientists among us), we can only confirm it by practicing one of its disciplines. We must ultimately determine what is fake or not, not CBS or Fox News. In the end, spiritual knowledge poses a far bigger challenge than earthly truths, but we are all made to do it if we really want to. So, trust in others for your faith, as you would, say, Stephen Hawkins for physics, or do it yourself (for unlike Hawkings and his math genius, we all have spiritual genius). It is really that simple, and no less confusing or "false" than when we put our faith in the daily news. Excpet that with spiritual news, we can know, for sure, if we really want to. It is all there, a package that is hard to unwrap but more than eager to be opened. FK
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