The Big Truth
Today God helped me to realize yet another reason to almost feel sorry for Christians.
Christians like to talk about “Christian Truth.” They don’t label it quite as blatantly as I just did, largely because they want it to be confused with actual truth, but they know that’s what they mean when then stick the word “truth” inside of a fish outline and plaster it on the back of their cars. They don’t mean “truth” in any sort of general sense, and they especially do not mean “truth” in any sort of verifiable, measurable, or even plausible sense; they mean “truth” as in “I’ve staked a great portion of my self-identity on this being true, so it must be true, so it is true.” In other words, the “truth fish” is a stellar example of Stalin’s “the big lie.” Joseph Stalin famously said that if you repeat a big lie often enough and loud enough it will become the truth. Christians have got this down.
The scientific method, on the other hand, says that for something to be “true” it must be measurable, it must have evidence, it must be repeatably demonstrable by independent parties, and it should be the simplest explanation that fits the available facts. God, by being so ineffable and so lacking in direct evidentiary existence, completely fails to be recognizable by science. Since more and more of our daily existence is controlled and enriched by things that have only been made possible by the scientific method, more and more people are coming to the point of view that unless something can be shown to have truth in some scientific sense, it doesn’t have real truth; it’s no better than something that some fiction writer just made up in his head.
So the Christians, or at least a major part of them, feel threatened by science, and feel threatened by those that would say that Christian truth is no more truth than Pluto’s claim that it’s a planet. Which is to say, no more true than anything which we might have once believed, but belief in which we gave up in the face of actual evidence.
The poster child for scientific truth threatening “Christian truth” is evolution.
Now to be fair, the anti-religion faction of scientifically knowledgable individuals, did kind of start this fight. They looked at the enormous numbers of Christians that chose to deny evolution and they said, let us not leave them alone in their darkness, let us shine our flashlights right into their eyes. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Non-metaphorically speaking, what they “said” was, “let’s take one of Christianity’s sacred symbols, the fish sign that they used to identify each other when being Christian was potentially punishable by death, and put an evolutionary spin on it, we’ll add feet and legs to remind people that fish evolved and came out of the sea.” And then they stuck the name Darwin in it. And then the Christians came up with images of fish (with the word truth inside) eating images of legged fish (with the word Darwin inside).
And the evolutionists said “nyahh, nyahh.” And the Christians said, “well, so are you.”
And God pointed out to me that displaying a “truth” fish is a lot like people in the south displaying Confederate flags, they recognize that there was a battle, they recognize that their side lost, but they keep hoping that no one will notice. It’s like any big lie. It would be sadly amusing if it weren’t for how much damage it’s done. And how much damage continues to be done in it’s service.
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