HUU Sermon Archives

Truth?

By Chris Edwards and Robin McNallie
Presented January 14, 2007

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Readings:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live...by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." - Joan Didion

Truthiness: "the quality by which one purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or intellectual examination." - Stephen Colbert

Talk

The talk was in the form of a conversation. Caleb was played by Robin McNallie.

C.E.: I've been wondering about reality. . .wondering IS THERE an objective reality everyone can agree on? Are there more versions of truth than there once were, or are we just more aware of them? I'm not even thinking about theology or philosophy or values, but the more factual --

CALEB: (enters or gets up) What are you talking about?

C.E.: Hey, Cousin Caleb. Truth!

CALEB: Truth, huh? Will you tell them about those meetings on Afton Mountain? How the Queen of England and those other world power-brokers secretly convene in that castle to manage the international drug trade?

C.E.: Hmmm...Where did you hear that?

CALEB: I've SEEN the cars, exiting 64 to speed up the mountain on the dark of the moon. But you won't talk about it because THEY won't let you.

C.E.: Who are THEY?

CALEB: THEY! The Combine, Opus Dei, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the black helicopter-runners who sit in their velvet-seated chairs around a monstrous solid gold table in their bunker, deep underground, plotting the enslavement of the universe.

C.E.: You said a castle.

CALEB: Well, the bunker is under the castle. They open their meetings with prayers from a preacher whose salary is paid by us taxpayers.

C.E.: Reality keeps getting more complicated. We like to think we're rational, and base what we know on science, but science gets more complicated: We have 99.9% the same genes as any other human, and 50% the same as yeast; different-sized particles obey different laws; and our motives and memories may not be what we think.

CALEB: "The fact that you can't remember being abducted by aliens and satanically abused is proof that it happened," said Lucy when she was giving psychiatric help for 5 cents.

C.E.: We think we're heirs of the Enlightenment. When I got to see the British Museum, I found an exhibit about that 18th-Century era when Western thinkers began conquering the darkness of mystery and superstition with the sunlight of reason. One example was a small display of elf arrows. I learned that for centuries, Europeans who dug those little objects from the earth (which look like our Native American arrowheads) had believed evil elves and demons shot them into livestock. A few smart Enlightenment thinkers figured, no, those were tools made by people in earlier times.

But now, more than 2 centuries after the Enlightenment, we have cattle mutilation stories, and a poll estimating 4 million Americans may have been abducted by extraterrestrials....

Caleb: Mexico and China are allies and threaten the American empire. That's why the US government stole the entire treasury of Mexico last year and assassinated its president. Me: Really? Do you mean, Fox? Caleb: Whatever his name. Yeah, the numbers 666 in code spell FOX. Me: How? Caleb: F is the 6th letter in the alphabet. O is the 15th, and how much is 1+5? X is the 24th -easy as 2+4! Me: Hey, does that explain FOX News? Caleb: No! 666 is the Antichrist. Fox News is the BEAST. Me: Well, I don't watch Fox. I read on the Internet... Caleb: Computers send out electromagnetic waves that scramble the plaques in your brain! Me: Well, maybe, but I read books more. Caleb: The printed word is a tool of oppression. I don't look at books OR computers OR media. I believe my eyes and ears. Me: So how do you know about electromagnetic waves? Caleb: A guy in a bar told me. He found it out working for Jimmy Hoffa, twenty years after Hoffa's quote unquote death. Me: Did he know Elvis? CALEB: No, but I do.

C.E.: Rumi wrote, "The satiated man and the hungry one do not see the same thing when they look upon a loaf of bread."

Remember those polls during the OJ Simpson trial, when a majority of white people said he was guilty but a majority of black people said no? Last summer we met some students from Laos who talked about a conflict called "the American war." The only name WE'D known for it was the "Vietnam War." Each of us base our perceptions on experience. . .

CALEB: Don't you want to know where I met Elvis? It was at a shooter's convention. . .

C.E.: What do we trust? Science? Skeptic magazine says "science is winning out over magic and superstition." But within many of our lifetimes, concepts attributed to science included: eugenics....Social Darwinism.... diagnosing homosexuality as an illness...and telling young women who aspired to be doctors, lawyers or astronauts, that they were afflicted with "penis envy." Were those theories pure science? - CAN human beings be unbiased?

My father, who was an engineer and an agnostic, used to talk about how little most of us understood the human-made things we depend on. Starting from scratch, how many of us could make a car or telephone that worked? (Let alone a computer.) Looked at that way, we're more surrounded by mysteries than our long-ago ancestors, with their simpler tools.

CALEB: Elvis is really no big deal. THEY distract you with hype about him.

What can I know? I believe in evolution because overwhelming evidence supports it. People I consider credible say so. But I'm not a scientist; I wouldn't know how to identify a fossil if I found one, or watch bacteria evolve to resist antibiotics. So in a way, my belief in evolution rests on faith.

I've never been to China - or even Gate City, Va. To believe THOSE places exist, I must take on faith the word of people I know, or of books, newspapers, television, the Internet....

CALEB: Bad.

C.E.: I took the existence of California on faith until six years ago, and England until last summer. Now I know they're real...

CALEB: Unless, of course, THEY made them up, and what you found was some giant mega-set scenario like in "The Truman Show."

C.E.: I had a friend who practiced Agnihotra. I was moved by the way she and her family would stop everything in the bustle of their small business to light their Vedic ritual fires. I didn't know why she had to call them "science," though, instead of just letting those moments of peace be enough. Later, she wrote me, "Please don't think I'm crazy, but I'm getting messages from beings in another galaxy." I answered, "I respect everyone's right to their own reality." I never heard back. Could I have been condescending?

CALEB: You WONDER?

C.E.: Her "messages" sounded harmless ... maybe comforting, or maybe fun -- like Bigfoot, or a thriller I just enjoyed reading, "The Historian," about Dracula. (Of course, I DON'T believe in vampires).

(CALEB PANTOMIMES BITING AND/OR SHOWS CANINE TEETH.)

But how would you answer a Holocaust denier, or someone who says (like the late economist Milton Friedman once did) that "There is no poverty in America"? . . . or accuses you of a crime you didn't commit?

Prof. Harry Frankfurt, in his new book, On Truth, says a society needs some common grounding in truth to function.

CALEB: You know, his last book was titled On Bullshit.

C.E.: If everyone's reality is equally valid, what happens when realities clash?

Caleb: In the 60s I hitchhiked across the desert. One night under the stars I met the Spirit of Light. That spirit was Jesus, Buddha, God, the Goddess, and you and me. It told me there are no boundaries. That ego is an illusion. PROPERTY is an illusion. The next day, when it was hot and no one stopping, I came to this snake museum right in the middle of the desert. A shiny Corvette was parked in front with the keys in the ignition. The Spirit of Light had placed that Corvette there. I started it up and revved off toward the mountains. But the tourist who had the title granting illusory ownership of that car didn't understand, and the cops and the prosecutor and the judge in the illusory court didn't understand.

C.E.: Everyone tries to speak the language of science. Even creationists. Our culture LOVES statistics. News organizations gobble them up. Remember Newsweek's report 25 years ago that a single woman over 40 had a higher chance of getting killed in a terrorist act than getting married? They retracted it this fall.

Once when I was young, starting a new job, I heard my co-workers ask each other questions like "Who IS the real father of Laura's baby?" I thought, this sure must be an intimate workplace, but it turned out they were talking about soaps. They treated the characters as real. Now, reality TV is replacing soaps; memoirs replacing novels. Does the public crave more reality - or hype dressed up as reality? The memoir writer who spends a few hours at a police station changes it to 3 months in jail to make it sell. Would The DaVinci Code have become quite so big a mega-blockbuster if its author hadn't said "Absolutely all of it...is historical fact"?

Is the impulse behind that ABSOLUTELY different from fundamentalism?

CALEB: "Apologia: This story is true. Of course, there are many lies therein and most of it did not happen, but it's all true. In that sense it is deeply religious, perhaps even Biblical." --Craig Ferguson, introduction to a less-famous novel, "Between the Bridge and the River"

C.E.: Are we losing our knack for storytelling, mythology, metaphor, nuance?

CALEB: REAL reality is boring.

C.E.: When the world gets weird, where is the line between caution and faith and paranoia? Some say we fear the strange more than the familiar. Terrorism more than heart attacks. In 1995, more than 600 people died from a heat wave in Chicago. Many were elderly and lived in poor neighborhoods, where they were so afraid of crime that they kept their windows and doors shut tight, though they had no fans or air conditioning. Could they have saved themselves?

CALEB: Too late now.

C.E.: Remember, Caleb, back when you thought the government was building death camps for hippies? I didn't believe you, but I didn't believe it either when you warned me THEY would barcode our foreheads.

CALEB: Oh, you mean where Revelation says "No man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark...or the name of the beast...The number of the beast is 6 hundred and 66."

C.E.: Sorry -- I promised we wouldn't talk about religion, OR philosophy!

CALEB: If a tree in a forest falls on a postmodernist, does it really leave a bump on his head?

C.E.: I didn't believe you about bar-coding foreheads, but five years ago the FDA approved the VeriChip - a human implant that can be scanned like a bar-code for your personal data. About 2000 people have them, worldwide. Growth has been slow, due to privacy concerns.

CALEB: Just wait!

C.E.: "A conspiracy theory attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an event or chain of events as a secret, often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance of powerful or influential people or organizations," says Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

CALEB: From a computer, and Wiccan(?) Hmph! Say, did you know THEY give instructions to each other in graffiti on the backs of highway signs. In code, when to meet around that gold table in that bunker. They hire lap dancers...which our taxes pay for.

C.E.: But you said they hired a preacher.

CALEB: Both.

C.E.: With each assassination, we used to hear the truth would come out one day, but there are still questions about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Did Guy Fawkes and other Catholics really plot to blow up Parliament ... or could the Protestants in control have made that up or exaggerated it as an excuse to crush them? Do questions like that ever get definitively resolved?

CALEB: Or are they just distractions to keep us off-track from the New World Order?

C.E.: Guess times have changed since John Lennon idealistically sang, "Imagine there's no countries..."? The New World Order scares people on both the right and left.

CALEB: Black helicopters enforcing gun control right along with global corporatism. THEY might do it all, you know.

C.E.: Conspiracies HAPPEN. Would you have believed, 50 years ago, that our CIA was using LSD in mind-control experiments on non-consenting citizens? Eventually the project got exposed. Fortunately, the experimenters never found anything they could use in the Cold War.

CALEB: Or so you think.

C.E.: One criterion for whether a conspiracy is credible is Ockham's Razor, named for a 14th century philosopher who suggested that when given 2 equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, we accept the simpler one. "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." If I wake up and hear the same sound on my roof the rain always makes, the sound MAY come from little green space invaders' footsteps, but more likely it's rain.

CALEB: Boring!

C.E.: If a car, driven very fast by a drunk chauffeur trying to outrun photographers, speeds into a tunnel, a tragic accident seems likely, but the suspicion that Princess Diana was murdered won't go away. We hear of conspiracies to keep the poor and minorities powerless by addicting them with alcohol, illegal drugs, nicotine and junk food, but doesn't capitalism account for that?

CALEB: Boring! I want dragons to slay! GOOD VERSUS EVIL!

C.E.: You've just quoted a newspaper headline from Sept. 12, 2001. But now, a poll says 1/3 of Americans think our government either carried out the Sept. 11 attacks....

CALEB: (shocked) Do you question that?

C.E.:...or stood aside for them to happen.

CALEB: Another poll says 43 percent still blame them on Saddam Hussein. Go figure.

C.E.: Of COURSE we get suspicious when leaders lie, use disasters to their advantage, or keep us in the dark - like the military hush over that research balloon that crashed in Roswell, NM, in 1947...

CALEB: Don't get me started on Roswell...

C.E.: In The Nation, Christopher Hayes writes "the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the PARANOID style that might be called the CREDULOUS style..." The more the spin we're given falls apart, the greater the appeal of paranoia.

When 4 Peacemaker Team members were abducted, and one killed, a pacifist friend who's very sane wondered if our CIA did it. I hope not. I hope Sen. Wellstone's plane crash was really an accident...

CALEB: Like THEY want you to.

CE: There's no source of information now that everyone trusts. We have more choices, but sometimes it feels we know less. Yet for me, the most convincing argument against the 9/11 conspiracy theories is, Can we really believe that leaders could have pulled off a mass-murder and covered it up so brilliantly when we keep seeing the same leaders screw up on so much else?

A corollary to Ockham is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Or, we could add, incompetence, laziness, apathy, short-sighted greed.

Another criterion for a conspiracy is: how many people would it take, with no one blowing a whistle?

CALEB: I read on the Internet that "4,000 Jews did not go to work at their jobs in the Towers that morning." Guess they got tipped off.

C.E.: Caleb, what do you have to believe to accept that?

I don't doubt some conspiracies are true. But I refuse to accept the conspiracist world-view. If we believe most of what happens is controlled by those guys around that gold table in that deep bunker, well, that has nothing to do with you or me. We're helpless. We can just sit back in passive-aggressive innocence, and give up. But if we see humanity as needing more work, wisdom or compassion, who can be sure the trouble, or the solution, doesn't involve US?

CALEB: Maybe you guys are wondering, why are we talking about all this dark, intellectual, controversial stuff on a Sunday morning. Where's the SPIRITUAL part?

C.E.: For me it's all a spiritual dilemma: How can we know "truth"? Without it, how do we know what to do? And given we have different realities, how can we connect?

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