The Prince of Peace and the Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas

I shall bear a column and it's name shall be called "The Prince of Peace and the Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas". Every year since The John Birch Society got the snowball rolling in 1959 with a pamphlet entitled "There Goes Christmas?!", someone in the ever-protesting world of quick-shake-up ultra-Conservatism has been whispering warnings about the demise of the Christmas season, issuing clarion calls to save Christmas from the tentacles of secular humanists and trial lawyers. [This will seem counterintuitive at this point in the column but go to local News-Talk 920am WGKA to send a Christmas Greeting Card to the ACLU, then read on.] This year, despite Wal-Mart's re-infusion of the Merry Christmas message along with other major department stores around the country, the Mayor's Office of Chicago made the "fateful" mistake of not accepting New Line Cinemas' "The Nativity Story" film to be shown at the German Christkindlmarket festival. (Cue the ultra-zealous Christian Conservative Right!) Few stopped to realize that the Mayor himself professes Christian faith. Few read deeply into the perfectly legitimate logic of the office's Executive Director, Jim Law, when he reasoned that "It would be contrary to acceptable advertising standards suggested to the many festivals holding events on Daley Plaza [to accept the story from New Line]". Despite many of the surrounding circumstances, some in the religious community are still marching out on cue with their "don't step on our baby Jesus" chorus.

What if we were to turn the tables? The ultra-Conservatives say, "You can't outlaw something just to avoid offending someone because some people are always in a desperate hurry to be offended." The glaringly obvious response in cases like the "War on Christmas" is, yeah, like you! Why do ultra-Conservative Devil-Behind-Every-Curtain types so often react rather than respond? Reaction happens as a defensive maneuver and comes off to many as a brand of fear and, in some cases, hatred. Responding usually brings a more reasoned solution. Instead of losing your Christmas spirit in defense of the Christmas spirit, have a little fun with it. Send the ACLU a Christmas Card rather than railing against their every move. After all, believe it or not, on occasion they have silently supported the public expression of Christmas. Don't believe me? Look up the "Rita Warren against Fairfax, Virginia" case where the ACLU championed her right to erect a nativity scene on government property because of earlier precedents set by the City of Fairfax. The point is, the ultra-Conservatives are often guilty of the same hypersensitivity they accuse the Left of having (and I say this as a Conservative). Richard Hofstadter wrote in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," "The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming `proof' of the particular conspiracy that is to be established." Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, comments, "You have a dynamic here, where you have the Christian right hysterically overrepresenting the problem, and then anecdotally you have some towns where lawyers restrict any kind of display or representation of religion, which is equally absurd." Before long, you have the jingle bell rocks! Every misguided school that bans Christmas displays becomes a slippery slope that lobbyists and trial lawyers will use to push through in every classroom of every school district in North America until X-masness is the rule of the land. Sure, the ACLU will turn around and do the two-step with another case like outlawing Christmas carols in a Nashville, Tennesee school, but do you really think it will lead to a triumph of secularism over a holiday like Christmas that thrives on an indwelling belief that cannot be legislated against? And furthermore, what do Christians often do once we have achieved our objective of having "Merry Christmas" hanging over our favorite Simon Shopping Mall? Do we actively engage culture with a modeled faith throughout the year or simply say we've won the war of faith because it is now prominently displayed in public? Do we consistently share Christ or transfer our evangelical responsibility onto a "Merry Christmas" banner or some other religious display? Perhaps the war is not over eradicating Christmas from the public sphere, the public sphere has resoundingly said they want and in fact need it as a reminder of peace. The Season of a Saviour that represents that internal peace is not going anywhere within a public sphere that continues to express renewed fervor overall for the message. The question for the ultra-Conservative Christian Right, Are we serving that baby or using Him as our battering ram? What is the benchmark of His success? Is it simply keeping His presence in the public sphere, or His having a relevant presence there? If the latter is more true, then we better behave ourselves.

Richard Dawkins Has God on the Ropes in Science verses Religion Debate - Final Round - FIGHT!

The New Atheists still hold onto the hope that God may be tapping out of the fight. In recent months, they have hit the campaign trail in a fury. Dawkins has shown up on O'Reilly and The Colbert Report, Sam Harris has covered cable talk shows and talk radio segments, and even the late great Carl Sagan is making a comeback post-mortem with a new release due out in the coming months with or without the help of George Noory. Despite all the valiant efforts, New Atheists still find themselves running into some marketing setbacks. For one, they never seem to propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. Atheism and fatalism start to sound synanomous after awhile. New Atheism fancies itself a straightforward appeal to our intellect, no emotion involved. The problem is, this approach proves dangerous if the religious community comes back and supports their belief with (shock and awe) Reason.

If truth is merely an idea with no Figurehead, you’re going to have a hard time getting a movement off the ground, right? Maybe the movement needs an Ascension into Heaven. Perhaps look into making a god to follow out of someone with star power – a galvanizing character of their own to follow. Oprah and Keanu Reeves come to mind. Sam Harris might do, but no offense against Sam, they need a little more sex appeal, a haggard beard, the Hippie-look, someone like Jesus Christ. Someone that people see like they did back with the Guy from Galilee and say, now there’s a guy that has that Shepherd Smith swoon appeal. I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth. Where do I put my nets?

The Urgency Conundrum

In addition to the lack of a Mobilizing Force, New Atheism wrestles with what I call the Urgency Conundrum. Warren Allen Smith, author of the year 2000 encyclopedia “Who’s Who In Hell?”, spent six decades up to age 85 sending letters asking people if they believe in God. He is a committed atheist. He is currently working on his magnum opus: a Web site called Philosopedia. He’s working hard. Why the urgency, you ask? He fears he doesn’t have many years before the memory drain. And he worries about the threat of fundamentalism in the East AND the West. It's a bit paradoxical. Why be so worried about saving a world with no intrinsic value, anyway? We don’t bend over backwards to save a cockroach. All they do is freak out the kids. We kill it, then we flush it, and we still sleep well at night.

The March of Morality

Another big question the movement can't seem to market its way out of is the "Origins of Morality" quest. A recent U.S. News article finds Jay Tolson planting these questions in the scientific fields of Consciousness Research. French mathematician Rene' Descartes gave us Cartesian Dualism where bodily organs send perceptions and other information via the brain to the mind. The mind would ponder, then makes decisions and direct the bodies' responses in word and deed. Cognitive theorists, over time, scoffed at this as the “Ghost in the Machine” argument but it worked well for awhile.

Recently neuroscientists like Francis Crick have picked up the trail with works such as "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul". He argues that "You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett backs him up with his `Fame in the Brain' analogy. At any one moment there are many potential conscious states in the body, many contending neuronal "assemblies", vying for "celebrity", for their moment in the spotlight. But only one can win the competition and it all depends on who is the Alpha-Neuronal assembly.

This begs the question, Where do the rules come from for the game? The conscious mind comes up with orderly representations of meaning, but it doesn’t create meaning. Where do we get the meaning from? Why do we want to give something meaning? Why does a kiss mean more to us than just, “Hmm, my brain just registered pressure from an outside force against my face. (Maybe that’s why man invented the French Kiss, just to take the pressure off the situation, but I digress).

All of this brings up the question posed by Jay Tolson. Am I just a survival machine? Is "meaning" nothing more than the sum of appropriate responses to information in ultimate service to life. If this is true, then life purpose, freedom and individuality are just reassuring illusions of possible survival value. (And great fodder for making the NY Times Bestseller list for a lot of psychobabblers involved in Life Coaching). But if our personality and very beliefs are simply the end result of some physiological Great Race to the service of our ultimate survival, then why do we have heroes willing to die for others rather than survive? Somebody should tell firefighters that they’re really screwed up in the head!

As recent as this summer, Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, himself a professed convert to Christianity, faced off in a scientific smackdown on the invitation of Time Magazine. Evolution, the complexity of life, miracles, stem cell research, the problem of good and evil and other heady topics were discussed. My impression after reading the transcripts is what follows.

Every decade or so a new group of people rise up to take God to the mat over His existence. They do this because they are enlightened. They have seen ALL the variables and have measured God and found Him wanting. Their omniscience allows them to do this. They explain to us that our faith has held us back from exploring and they show us gently how we have explained God into existence. They can do this because they have explained Him out of existence. They pity us. We should pity ourselves. If we were only willing to try something new, we would discover things we would never have known otherwise. Think about it, someone had to be the first to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things, here, and drink whatever comes out", right? If it wasn't for someone's faith...er...enlightenment, we'd still be eating our cereal dry. And if it wasn't for these enlightened individuals, we'd all still be running around amazed by the size of the universe and acting like we don't yet understand its farthest reaches. When all is said and done, I say, thank GOD for atheists!

Richard Dawkins Has God on the Ropes in Science verses Religion Debate - Round 1 - FIGHT!

Friedrich Nietzche is getting new support from Big Wig Atheists in the `God Is Dead Campaign’. Fortunately God is being leant support from morticians in the `Nietzsche Is Dead Campaign’”. According to a recent study, 85% of America has a faith in God ("What We Believe" Time Magazine, Oct 30th, 2006). However, we part ways into one of several categories when we drill down to Who or What God actually is. Undeterred by our obstinance, the New Atheists of the world hold onto their faith (no, that's not a Freudian Slip though maybe it should be) that God may yet be on the verge of tapping out of the ring. A slew of recent works have flown off the shelves by the likes of Oxford University prof Richard Dawkins, neuroscience Know-it-All Sam Harris, and Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett. We now have the Multiverse Hypothesis in cosmology saying we may have upwards of 300 billion universes, and if we’re one in a billion, why not spring up accidentally without divine intervention? Annoyingly enough, that also increases the chances that nature is even more outside the scope of our understanding, but, I digress.

Logic Attacks Religion

Dawkins sees it as a closet movement “I believe we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists.” He goes on to goad in a November Wired Magazine article that “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists. Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying?…Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”

Yeah, and your point? Most people, on occasion, grant legislators both stupidity and dishonesty. But what do you do with the other 85% of "stupid" God-fearing Americans when you figure that many of them are doctors, lawyers, and the like. New Atheist Glen Slade, the organizer of the monthly atheists “Brights” group in London offers more hope that the War on Terror is setting the stage for a No-Faith Takeover by raising awareness about the existence of more than one world religion. Well, so do specials on The History Channel but no matter how high-priced basic cable gets, it’s still cheaper than a war on terror – I think we had knowledge of multiple world religions before the war stepped in. Glen Slade continues, "A lot of moderates give a power base to extremists. A lot of Catholics use condoms and get divorced and even listen to punk rock like Bad Religion (Greg Graffin’s an atheist). They still stay Catholic. But when the Pope speaks, he still gets credit for speaking for a billion people." Hmm, I actually like Slade. He’s more religious than most religious people I know. He wants to call BS on religious apathy. It's all or nothing, baby! Dawkins, however, gives a tired argument. "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.” Sure it is, if you believe that all religions are fundamentally the same.

So if logic can't win the day for the New Atheist, you can always drag out the Apocalytic Threat.
Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, believes we are going to kill ourselves off over religion. But he’s not worried that time won’t change us and we will eventually see the error of our ways. He points to slavery and rests his case. “At some point it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God." But won’t that only work for those people who succumb to the very thing you’re asking them to lay aside, namely, groupthink and a culture of religious belief? When asked about the look and feel of a world without God, Sam offers a Religion of Reason, the 21st Century equivalent of Robespierre's Culture of the Supreme Being. He offers the Atheist Prayer – “That our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.”

All of this double-speak makes my head hurt. It works on the tired premise that religion is not rational. Well, riddle me this, Batman? Where does your motivation for disproving faith come from? A desire to have cognitive resonance? Where is your dissonance coming from? These incovenient questions pose a marketing hurdle for the New Atheist movement. (That and the supremely depressing end result of their logical arguments). As it turns out, so does new scientific discovery in the field of consciousness research. And that is where we will turn in Round 2...

The American Theatre of the Absurd Marches On While 9 out of 10 Terrorists Vote Democrat

When in doubt, look at Hollywood. Why have cinema ticket sales been on a downturn overall for some years now? Because they have a new competitor in the entertainment media..."hard news" media! MSNBC's Brian Williams spouted off earlier this week, lamenting the increasingly held public perception of his friend and comedic pundit John Stewart on Comedy Central's The Daily Show as a hard news source. Former CNN Headline News Anchor David Goodnow calls much of it a "theatre of the absurd" in an interview on The Hub Radio Show this week. Can you blame him? In the scope of three weeks the world has wrestled with the "Pocket Commie" in North Korea and his nuclear tests, the terrorist vote has come in with resounding and giddy support for Democrats on November 7th (www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52747), and Iran's Devolutionary Guards are busy firing off test missiles in Tehran. All the while what are we being peppered with at home? Tales of a Mark "Foley-Artist" and his online chit chats with of-age Pages, calls for the House Speaker to bow out in shame and incessant bloviating over a has-been wacko politician with no stake in the upcoming election other than as a galvanizing factor for the base and a reminder that his blood might as well be housed in a cryonics lab. Hello Alphabet-Soup-Media, we're sick of the politics for the sake of politics. We don't care about their egos! The theatre of the absurd only gets worse on the local level. (Investigative news teams are the creme' de la creme'). "Killer Gas Pumps" in Cleveland, Ohio and UFO sightings in Syracuse. Hell, re-runs of FRIENDS just trounced Katie Couric's CBS Nightly Skews in L.A.'s prestigious infotainment audience!

Gate-keeper news moguls are constantly asking themselves the question, How do we make news that's relevant and therefore, marketable and revenue generating? Here's an answer. How about focusing on the issues that matter! A National Retail Sales Tax Plan that overhauls a doomsday-date for Social Security, a support for our troops on the ground that doesn't put them at further risk due to a half-hearted commitment to their on-going efforts, and an Administration that acknowleges the similarities between "National Security" and "Border Security" without talking out of both sides of their mouth and giving us a "pass-off" bill.

On November 7th, vote and exercise your freedom of choice. But investigate for yourself and leave the sleight-of-hand media out of the process. Let THE issues be the issue, not their issues.

Education's War Games

October in an election season is tailor-made for a war of the words. Competition runs high for shelf space with booksellers and a seat with O’Reilly. Add the terror component and you have a boiler room. But there is a war room where we are in a losing trend and the long-term effects directly impact our ability to engage every enemy at home and abroad. America’s boys are dying before they leave the classroom. And our obsession with the sacred grail of feelings-based education and ramped up social conditioning is killing the very feelings they are meant to preserve. Nothing kills like apathy!

In 2003, 65 percent of boys earned high school diplomas compared to 72 percent of girls (Garibaldi, 2006). The number is only becoming more disparate over time. College bound females outnumber boys to an extent that many schools are now employing affirmative action for boys in admissions.

How have we reached this point and why should we be concerned? First off, in a time of war and a nation grappling with international issues, strong, male leaders are needed to employ principles arrived at by exercising their nature. As author Gerry Garibaldi puts it, “boys’ aggressive and rationalist nature—redefined by educators as a behavioral disorder—[is]…getting many of them in trouble in the feminized schools.” Why is socialized education afraid of the aggressive and rational nature of boys? Is it an ethical persuasion that says nothing good can come of it, the “rational” and “aggressive” inherently lead to the challenge of social mores? We like our world the way it is. Or is it more about pragmatism? Crowd control is necessary when dealing with adolescent boys in large numbers. Where does that leave the boy that learns by asking questions, not simply completing assignments obediently as girls are more prone to do?

Move them outside, and boys’ natural inclinations are being assaulted on the playground. Willett Elementary in Attleboro, Massachussetts, has now ousted tag, touch football and other “chasing games” out of concern for injury risks and liabilities (LaHoud, The Sun Chronicle, Oct 21st 2006). Dodgeball has taken a beating. As have many sports where winners and losers must be identified. Does this really make the playground safer? God forbid we tilt the sacred level playing field. If the playground is an early education to prepare for life and human interaction, how is this preparing boys (and girls for that matter) for the meritocracies within corporate America, and the competitive world of outsourcing to places like Bangalore where boys will not only compete against others but against new digital platforms and applied innovation?
Boys are having an identity crisis. Some applaud their feminization as a culturalization in the diversity of human interaction. But what about the danger? Could a danger come when growing adolescent boys, discouraged from exploration into their intellectual nature, feel trapped between a choice of apathy and compliance or engagement in the lesser reaches of male aggression and rationale? Where does this choice leave them? And if our future is currently in basic training, a loss on the war of the playground is a loss for the soul of a nation.

Pandora's War In the Sandbox!

We've heard it all from every side staring cockeyed at the boob tube night after night. America has a record of imperialism that marches on in Iraq. America is spreading freedom. America is spreading tyranny. There were no WMDs. They FedExed the WMDs. We should draw down troop numbers and leave. We should ramp up troop numbers and get the job done. America is in an unwinnable war! Since when does winning have to be an objective to justify going to war? What if the first step is realizing there are no winners and losers this time, only necessitating circumstances? And on and on it goes, where it will stop, we must all at some point agree, nobody knows. One thing we do know is that we've opened up a Pandora's Box in the Middle East, or rather, a Pandora's Box was opened upon us. No one not suffering from amnesia questions the bi-partisan support (at the time) for war with Afghanistan, the less limited but still majority support for war with Iraq (after months of U.N. weapons inspectors were given the cold shoulder) and the crimes against humanity propogated by The Butcher of Baghdad. But in the current Middle Eastern front of the War on Terror, it's time we blew the whistle. The bill of goods is being sold by the Left and the Right. Given the centuries old scorn of Western society by Jihadists in the Middle East, a major attack on our homeland was inevitable. A response of some sort was necessary to discourage or, at a minimum, delay the sitting powers at the time in Afghanistan AND Iraq from further indirect or direct support of attacks on the United States. And any politician currently using "a total withdrawal" or any similar language is either A) taking advantage of your emotions and selling a dishonest optimism as a November 7th platform, or B) not being serious or educated in their understanding of the religious nature of the war as seen by Islamic Fundamentalists.

The Middle-Eastern view of history is not the American lunch-in-a-sack, fast food sound byte culture that allows us to declare success or failure after one, two or even five years. They know how to chew their food, digest and be PATIENT. Simply put, the Jihadist conflict with the West predates attacks on 911, attacks on the USS Cole, American Embassies in Africa, military barracks in Saudi Arabia, Marine barracks in Lebanon, the World Trade Center in `93 or even the song-and-dance of a Playboy Bunny Presidential Happy Birthday Wish! The conflict actually pre-dates the War of 1812 when in 1802 President Jefferson decided to challenge the "barbarism" of Arab warships preying on American merchant ships off the Barbary Coast. Jefferson asked the Arab diplomat "where's the shame?" and was given an answer that their right to attack was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, written in the Koran, that all nations not answering to their authority were sinners, worthy of subjugation. Adams, his predecessor, had warned that "We ought not to fight at all unless we determine to fight them forever". Jefferson, bucking the trend, launched his response against the twenty year record of kidnapping and ransoming of American merchantmen in North Africa. After the Bashaw of Tripoli took the crew of the USS Philadelphia captive at the Tripoli Coast, William Eaton rounded up his Marines and broke out to march 500 miles across Libya and take the coastal town of Derna, simultaneously ending the conflict (for a time) and giving the Marines a new line to their Marine hymn along with a great accessory for their uniforms - a sword shaped like an Arab scimitar (America, Bennett 182-183).

The time for the debate over how to close Pandora's Box is over. If America is a victim, many of its greatest wounds may be self-inflicted by those who would like to get this pesky little war over with so as to get back to internal politics and power-brokering. NEWSFLASH FROM THE COMMON MAN: There will never be a safe and total disengagement date for American interests in Iraq or anywhere else in the Middle East. Why? Because it's not about the oil stupid! It's not about the land. It's not about the prestige and it's not about a seat at the United Nations. It's only what these things represent. Quit thinking like a Westerner and getting distracted by claims to political motivations as they are given in diplomatic talks with Islamic Fundamentalist politicos. Does this mean we are destined to be an occupying force? Yes and no. We will not occupy but we will always be a support from a shorter distance. With any luck, we will never again push the likes of John O'Neill and Ahmed Shah Massoud to the back of the line. Everything changed for America after 9-11. For the Jihadist, it was simply a boldfaced chapter in an on-going religious conflict between Allah and The Great Satan. And no number of proposed Nancy Pelosi changes can dress up the House enough to make them feel at home.

The American Fib Factor - Easy Steps to Being a Damn Good Liar - Honestly!

In the beginning there was Adam the first man, Eve the first woman and the Serpent the first consultant. If there’s one thing you can’t be in life it’s honest when you’re trying to get ahead. If 95% of statistics are made up on the spot, then your goal should be to work even harder at fabricating the other 5% to where they’re more truthfully false than the 95% sounded. And when you’re really good, when you’ve done it long enough, you can graduate to the level where you actually believe your own lies and can convince those around you that not only are you the bringer of truth, but that the truth is worth the cost you charge. You are ripe for a successful career in many respected industries…politics, legal counsel, sales, media, being an older sibling on Christmas Eve. Aaah, this is where life begins. You may wonder, what is it about lies that makes them so believable? Are there levels of lying? What would you consider to be a liar at the grade school level? High school? Undergraduate? Grad School level? How do you reach PhD status? What are some of the obstacles to reaching the loftiest levels? What compromises a good lie?

First, what are good times to withhold information from those you love or those you hate for that matter? Try this one on for size. You have just been told that the girl your best friend is dating is really using him to get to his Porsche Carrera, the swank condo, and the realtor that sold him both. At this point one must ask, is "appropriate lying" a question of circumstance?

For those of you in the Bible-thumper crowd, here's a moral conundrum. How do you explain Rahab, the whore who saved the nation of Israel (Joshua 2:1-14) when she ball faced lied her way into protecting the Israeli spies she'd been smuggling in order to get them out of the city of Jericho alive? Or Jacob, engaging the classic family feud to garner his brother's first-born inheritance (Genesis 25:27-34). Flip to Malachi and you see God Almighty applauding the totality of Jacob's life over his older brother (Malachi 1:1-5). Which is more important from these stories? The tenacity and level of value that we place on what we value, or how we acquire what we value? What is God saying about His nature in honoring those who honor what He honors? Does the end justify the means?

In recent days, you look across the political landscape, scratch your head and say, how do you arrive at a Daniel Crane sexscapade, a Jack Abramoff/Ralph Reed liaison, a Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid for Realtor, or any political campaign or lobby scandal where the players doggedly stand by their actions as acceptable. Are they lying to themselves? Why might that be a dangerous habit? What happens when we believe our own lies? What happens to the Coservative Right, often self-described as synonomous with Christian values, when they use God as a rubber stamp for policies such as the Faith Based Initiative Non-profit Gold Rush. What about a Left that rushes in to blindly and indiscrimanately elevate a woman's choice above that of her unborn infant, er, fetus, then cries that lawmakers need to legalize immigrant workers to make up for a smaller working class that does not have numbers enough to financially support failing social institutions? It all smacks of a passage in Genesis 1:24 of the NIV (Nihilist International Version).

“Man spoke: Let us make God in our own image, make Him reflecting our nature…So man created God in his own image, in the image of Man he created Him. Male and female, they created Him.”

We chuckle at youthful ignorance.

A little boy asks his father, "Daddy, how much does it cost to get married?". His Father replies, "I don't know, son, I'm still paying."

But when the rubber meets the proverbial space between the white lines, we must marvel at his honesty. Why do enlightened and mature adults cower from directly and honestly addressing many of the issues they face in today’s world? Are the stakes that much higher? Or is it simply an issue of respect. Is it easier to lie when someone doesn’t have respect for the other person, group, or themselves? In an ironic twist of fate, our sophisticated culture still wrestles with a Gospel play on words that is more than 2,000 years old. For four consecutive books it sets up the premise that the Truth is a Person, not a concept.

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free?”—John 8:32

Ever wonder why? How would believing this, that Truth is a Person and not a concept, affect one’s concept of truth? Of lying? How might it simplify the political process? Truth would then become less negotiable. Where it's easy to negotiate philosophical pros and cons, ethics wars and the like, it's difficult to do the same with a person’s identity and reputation. Lying held against the truth of the Person would then become an argument based on clearly established precedent (if the person were consistent), not revisionism to fit the current wind pattern of popular belief. But why would we want that! It's too simple. We're sophisticated. We're postmodern. So we send the kids back out in the yard. Someday they'll understand. We have a media monster with a healthy appetite that needs a steady diet of scandels to stay energized. It keeps the monster focused externally. We're never left alone with our own thoughts.