Sunday, December 5, 2021

"What is truth"?

"Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews" (John 18:37-38a).

The New York Post reported recently that the brother of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Chris, was involved in helping his brother conduct a cover up of his sexual harassment escapades. The report claimed that Chris, who is the anchor (now suspended) of his own show on CNN, used his position and his professional contacts to try various tactics to help his brother weather the scandal.

In the report of 1 December, a number of individuals are quoted, from both CNN as well as some of the women who came forward to accuse Cuomo, saying that Chris should resign because he "has lost all journalistic integrity" and that “anything short of firing Chris Cuomo reflects a network lacking both morals and a backbone.” The report continues by saying that Chris's contract, which was valued at $6 million a year, had been renewed earlier this year. That contract, and indeed Chris's future career, was in doubt in light of these allegations (I should mention here that many are the anchors and news reporters who have been "rehabilitated" by the networks after such scandals).

I could not help but think about this and the utter hypocrisy and blindness of many of those who are accusing the Cuomo's of lack of morals and the like. As Al Mohler reminds us often in his Briefing, whatever worldview you hold will dictate how you conduct yourself and what you will think. And the vast majority of the folks who are complaining about the Cuomo's are people whose worldview is a godless one that considers morality a malleable thing used in whatever way is expedient to bring about their ends. In a very real way, the old adage "the ends justify the means" is the guiding light of such individuals.

It takes an amazing level of chutzpah to live as though there is no God and to believe that we are nothing but an accident, while at the same time holding others up to some sort of manufactured moral standard. You can be sure that those who are so adamant at condemning those who are engaging in sexual harassment today (and rightly so, I might add), will at some time in the future, jettison that outrage if it becomes convenient to do so. And you can't blame them (you could, but stay with me here). When you believe that there is no such thing as an objective standard of morality, right and wrong are simply identified with whatever society thinks is right and wrong at the moment. That is why it is so brainless for such people to complain about what our forefathers did that today's generation finds objectionable. After all, if their society dictated that slavery, to cite the most egregious example, was right, how can they now condemn it? Idiotic, to say the least!

This is the reason why, in spite of all that secular society attempts to say and do, Christianity is the only rational way to view the world. It is the Christian who has a rational, logical way to view the world. And he does so, not because he is somehow better or more intelligent than others, but because the God he serves is a logical, rational God. In fact, it is the God of the Christian who invented reason and logic. Without God, nothing makes sense and everything is relative. The secularist is right when he says that everything is devoid of sense and order if indeed we're just random products of unthinking evolutionary forces. Thank God that he does not know whereof he speaks!

 

 



5 comments:

  1. Excellent post. With no God... morality is ultimately ALWAYS subjective. How could it be otherwise? And when morality is subjective, there is always room to excuse or exonerate anyone of anything and everything. And whatever crazy inconsistencies are generated in the process are just ignored or winked at.

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    1. Absolutely true. It was Christ who said that the “word [of God] is truth” (John 17:17). Without God, truth is nothing but a mirage.

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    2. See Bill Bennett's book, "The Death of Outrage."

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  2. Now what are you going to tell all those Platonists, Aristotelians, and Kantians who assure us you can arrive at truth through Pure Reason? lol

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    1. Here's the problem that the rationalist has: they must have a presupposition that there is such a thing as truth in order to "discover" it. Furthermore, if you don't have a standard, then what "truth" are you going to establish by reason alone? The atheist's reason leads him to believe that there is no God. It is essential to remember (and Aristotle and Plato did not understand and Kant ignored) the fact that man is totally depraved and that his mind (and with it his reason) is as corrupted as the rest of his being. Thus, man can by reason understand some truths, but he cannot understand the truths of the gospel and the life that is in Christ (and that's not even considering that these can only be known through revelation). And, after all, those are the truths that really count. Without them, our knowledge of other truths (like the self-evident truths of Jefferson and the rest) mean little! Thanks for your comment.

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