Walking Away from Truth in the Social Imagination...

We live in a culture that is defiant of any notion of truth. "What is truth?" Pilate asked ~ John 18:38.

What is your truth is not my truth... that is pretty much what Pilate meant.  Jesus said, "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice" and Pilate said, "What is truth"? Sadly that is where are today in this country and other nations that follow our lead. The Spirit of Pilate is alive today in our universities and governments and churches. We live in a culture that is defiant of truth. We are anti-truth. If that is true, we must ask ... what is truth?

People say there is truth in all kinds of ism (s); for instance, culturalism where in we find 'truth' in the cultural data crystallized by traditions and customs.

Surveys show that 36 and older state that there are no moral absolutes. Why is that? Is it really because there is no truth today? Those at the other end of the surveys tell us that morality and truth depend upon individual preference and circumstances. Here is a list of truth ism (s) being applied today.

Humanism says that man is the truth.
Mysticism says that intuition is the truth.
Skepticism says that no one can know the truth.
Hedonism says whatever feels good is the truth.
Secularism says that the present world is the truth.
Relativism says that in each situation there is truth.
Pluralism says that everyone has a piece of the truth.
Existentialism says that self determination is the truth.
Positivism says that whatever man confesses is the truth.
Pragmatism says that whatever works for you is the truth.

Soren Kierkegaard said that there is no truth in the masses. What did he mean by that? It is exactly what Pilate meant. Kierkegaard wrote, "There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth, and that in truth itself there is need of having the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth ...even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd—a crowd to which any decisive significance is attributed, a voting noisy audible crowd—untruth would at once be in evidence." ~ SK

What is truth? Is there any absolute truth that does not entangle us in lies? Yes, it is the way, the life and the truth ~ Jesus Christ. Those outside of the truth of Jesus Christ hold down the truth of God.... they exchange the truth of God for a lie. And, sadly, this is the hour in which we live. We have a culture and society that has exchanged the truth of God for a lie. It is the departure from or walking away from truth that is our demise and fall (as it was) into doubt, error and into the chaos of a very dark social imagination!

What is Lying in the Social Imagination?

Everybody lies.  It may only be “white” lies, but everyone tells lies or “omits the truth” sometimes.

We start lying at around age 4 to 5 when children gain an awareness of the use and power of language.  This first lying is not malicious, but rather to find out, or test, what can manipulated in a child’s environment.  Eventually children begin to use lying to get out of trouble or get something they want. 

White lies, those concocted to protect someone’s feelings, are not a big deal at all.  The person, however, who seems to feel compelled to lie about both the small and large stuff has a problem. Their problem is having a weak sense of identity within a group, within a larger social imagination. They may feel in a kind of limbo or misplaced within the social reality. They lie to protect themselves, look good, gain financially or socially and avoid punishment. 

Lying often gets worse with the passage of time. When you get away with a lie it often impels you to continue your deception especially if it wins you favor with others.

The other potentially more serious problem is that you can and will forget the real place you had in the social imagination as untruths blend and blur... confusing the old with the new fabricated place. You might imagine getting away with your lies (only if we/you the absolute truth) and we/you could if the social imagination did not have a memory bank of original information; as long as it remembers the absolute truth.

Yes, even in that kind of uncertainty, there could be lies about you that you never had anything to do with.  You see, we can give people the wrong impression of who we are and are not and not because we lie but because we don't have the information they want from us based on what they think we have regardless whether or not we have it. You see, everyone in this world wants something from someone 'information' - they want from us and we from them. This is what the social imagination (our social reality) is about giving and taking; its about exchanges of information that create and build a social construct that becomes a sustained social interaction in which we exist.

So, in a way, we seem to be caught up in vicious circle of exchanges of information which is both lies/truth. Its more often than not that we just often don't have the information that someone or some people want or expect from us.  So, we cannot share, we cannot give what others want from us and so they take from us what they want. We even allow it because we know that we cannot offer what they want even though at the same time we can be taking something from them. In that realization or position, if make something up or we don't make something up, we could lose out either way in the give/take of the social imagination - social reality.

What can and does happen frequently, is that those who want information from us will make up something for us on our behalf when we cannot or do not provide them with what they want.  In the example of, if you are seen with them then that must mean you exchanged information with them. But, as it turns out, you did not have what they wanted and so lies are constructed to make you look bad, or them look good. Or to make you look good just so that they can look good too.

Also, if you do make something up as it seems necessary to do so, and it is accepted as useful or good information then ties/relationships can be won but... based on lies. Can the social imagination be built on lies? Seems so. Its not that this happens rarely, it happens often and even on macro levels between countries. The victor gets to tell the history. The group/person that won the battle whether it was won based on lies or not doesn't matter in long run... only that something was won - information.

Is there any truth out there? For some, it is enough that we just agree on what is the truth of the moment. But, what is truth so that we can know it in the moment? One for sure, there is no truth in the masses...so who is under the mask, its anyone's call or is it what anyone wants him/her to be at a given moment? Perhaps, that is one's moment of truth! That's entanglement reality...! Is there any other?



*Excerpts from online article ~ https://www.today.com/health/why-people-lie-how-tell-if-they-are-2D80554952

Study: Atheists Find Meaning In Life By Inventing Fairy Tales...

Well, anything is possible in the 'fallen' social imagination...

One thing for sure, all things are permitted but not all things edify ~"Everything is permissible," but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible, but not everything is edifying" - 1 COR 10:23.

Find here below the complete and unchanged article by Richard Weikart responding to a study done and its findings as to why or how atheists find meaning for their lives in fairy tales.

Atheists often snidely dismiss religion as nothing but a fairy tale. Allegedly, religion is a self-created mythical crutch to comfort people who are unwilling to face the stark realities of the universe. As one famous atheist put it, religion “is the opiate of the people.” By this Karl Marx meant religion is a tool to anesthetize the masses so they can be oppressed.

Atheists portray themselves as arch-rationalists who embrace reality without flinching. As I explain in my recent book, “The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life,” many prominent atheist thinkers, such as Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, have insisted that because there is no God, there is also no cosmic purpose, no objective morality, and no transcendent meaning to life.

The atheistic Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg dismissed meaning and morality as an illusion in a 2003 article, “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life.”

But then many of them flinch. Just a few weeks ago the online magazine Real Clear Science announced that famous Christian pastor Rick Warren and Christian scholar William Lane Craig were mistaken to claim that without God, life has no meaning. This article claimed that a new empirical study verified that atheists do find meaning in life. The subtext seems to be: See? Atheism isn’t so bad after all.
This is not an isolated phenomenon. The prominent atheistic evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has also expressed dismay that anyone would dare suggest that atheists don’t have any meaning in their lives. But if you dig deeper—for example, by actually reading the empirical study—you find that atheists who insist that non-religious people can find meaning in life have changed the meaning of the word “meaning.”

Life Does Have Meaning. I Just Invent It...

The 2018 study in question by David Speed, et al, “What Do You Mean, ‘What Does It All Mean?’ Atheism, Nonreligion, and Life Meaning,” used surveys to try to figure out if atheists find meaning in life or are nihilistic. This survey defined someone as nihilistic if he or she upheld the position: “In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose.”

This study found that atheists and non-religious people are not nihilistic, because they claimed that they did have a purpose in life. This is an interesting finding that seems to refute the oft-repeated charge (levied by religious folks) that atheists are nihilistic.

However, there is a problem with this finding. The survey admitted the meaning that atheists and non-religious people found in their lives is entirely self-invented. According to the survey, they embraced the position: “Life is only meaningful if you provide the meaning yourself.”

Thus, when religious people say non-religious people have no basis for finding meaning in life, and when non-religious people object, saying they do indeed find meaning in life, they are not talking about the same thing. If one can find meaning in life by creating one’s own meaning, then one is only “finding” the product of one’s own imagination. One has complete freedom to invent whatever meaning one wants. This makes “meaning” on par with myths and fairy tales. It may make the non-religious person feel good, but it has no objective existence.

I Find Meaning in Self-Contradiction...

There is a long history of atheists wrestling with the question of the meaning of life, and it usually ends the same way. In 2015 the online periodical BuzzFeed interviewed atheists about how they found meaning. While they uniformly denied that there was any overarching meaning to life or the universe, they insisted that they find meaning and significance in their own personal lives. Many also implied that certain moral positions are objectively better than others, even though they presumably do not believe in objective morality.

One example was the response of the atheistic scientist and journalist Kat Arney. She said her rejection of religion “was an incredibly liberating moment, and made me realise that the true meaning of life is what I make with the people around me – my family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. People tell religious fairy stories to create meaning, but I’d rather face up to what all the evidence suggests is the scientific truth – all we really have is our own humanity.

So let’s be gentle to each other and share the joy of simply being alive, here and now. Let’s give it our best shot.”Arney’s position powerfully illustrates the problem many atheists seem loathe to confront. The “scientific truth” does not tell us to be “gentle to each other.” It doesn’t tell us anything about how we should live (and obviously many people are not gentle to each other, so there is nothing empirical to suggest that being gentle to each other is the way of nature).

But apparently many atheists and non-religious people have a hunger for meaning and a sense of moral rectitude that their worldview cannot satisfy. Sure, they are free to invent their own meaning and morality, but then they should be honest and admit that their meaning and morality has no advantage over the meaning or morality religious people put forward or for that matter, it has no advantage over the meaning and purpose evil people invent. Their self-created meanings are every bit as much “fairy stories” as the religious ones they like to lampoon.

Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of "The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life" and "Hitler’s Religion."

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/29/study-atheists-find-meaning-life-inventing-fairy-tales/