Truth, Lie and the Observant Farmer

I saw a meme the other day that told the old story of the time Lie dressed itself up as Truth. Of course, it had been transmogrified into a parable about how wicked Donald Trump is by someone I've seen post the most outrageous balderdash to defend his progressive vision of the future.

In the version I heard many moons ago, the story went something like this.
Lie Steals Truth's Clothes:

One hot summer day, Truth was walking in the woods and came upon a pond. Truth being overly warm, decided she'd take a little swim. She hung her clothes on a nearby bush and plunged into the water. Meanwhile, not far away Lie was lurking as he always does, looking for a way to deceive. He heard Truth splashing around in the pond and went to check it out. When he saw Truth's clothes hanging on the bush, a wicked, naughty, evil plan just popped into his nasty little mind.

He would steal Truth's clothes! Then he could tell all the lies he wanted, but because he would be dressed up as Truth, people would believe him. Quick as a flash he grabbed Truth's clothes, slipped them on over his own and ran for it. Truth saw him just then and despite her lack of clothing, she set off in hot pursuit, for Truth knew what sort of trouble Lie could cause running around dressed as herself.

Lie Tells Some Whoppers:

As Lie quickly put some distance between himself and his angry, wet, naked pursuer, he met a man coming down the road. "I might as well try out Truth's clothes and see how they work," he decided.

Lie went up to the stranger and told the man a pretty good lie. The stranger said, "You know that must be the truth because he is wearing Truth's clothes."

Smirking at his own cleverness, Lie went further down the road, where he soon met a second man. "Hello, sir," said Lie and proceeded to tell a big fat lie this time. 

The second man scratched his chin and said, "You know that sounds like a lie to me, but he's wearing Truth's clothes so it must be the truth."

Lie Employs Statistics:

By this time Truth was gaining on Lie and was just minutes behind. Lie, unaware of this, spots a third man, an old farmer, approaching. "This time I'll try a real doozy," he thought and proceeded to tell a lie so incredible that he might not have got away with it at first, but he used a lot of phony statistics and fake stories to make the lie sound even better and the farmer looked for a moment as though he'd bought Lie's story.

"You know," said the third man. scratching his head. "That story you just told there Sonny, sounds like a great big whopper of a lie." Then he looks off down the road and turns back to Lie. "But just because it sounds like Truth, don't make it Truth. You may look like Truth, fella. You may sound like Truth. You may even wear Truth's clothes, but mister, you ain't Truth." He points back along the way that Lie had come.

"You certainly ain't Truth, mister Lie," the farmer shook his head, "No sir, because yonder comes the nekkid Truth!"

At least that's the way I heard it.

© 2019 by Tom King

On Philosophers and Magicians



C.S. Lewis, theologian, philosopher and writer

 I have a couple of friends who keep trying to lure me into a name-dropping philosophical debate. I suspect someone's just waded through a college philosophy course and is wondering what to do with all that stuff they just shoved into their brains. I resist the urge to play the "I can quote Kafka." game.

Now don't get me wrong. There are many philosophers and theologians (who are also members of that particular intellectual caste) whom I greatly admire. A friend of mine admires Kierkegaard, for instance, and I too find some of the things he writes very enlightening. There are theologians like Dietrich Bonhoffer, Martin Luther and C.S. Lewis whose work I find of vast benefit to the faithful and to me personally.  Reading Lewis' brilliant book "Mere Christianity", for instance, was one of those Gestalt "Aha" experiences for me. Unlike many lesser philosophers and theologians, Lewis makes things clearer rather than more complex.

I judge the value of philosophers and theologians by how clear they make things. In the world I find there are two types of practitioners of this ilk - I think of them as prophets and magicians. The prophets make the way forward clearer for their readers and skillfully direct their readers' attention toward something which is greater than themselves. Magicians, on the other hand, merely confuse, misdirect and show off their own dazzling vocabulary and intellectual prowess in order to draw attention to themselves and to gain the befuddled admiration of their readers.

Magicians are amusing to watch, but I can hardly take them seriously.

Tom King

Ridiculing Christians for Fun and Profit

So what did I do to you?

by Tom King (c) 2011

An Open Letter to My Non-Believer Friends:

I've never quite understood why non-Christians feel the need to ridicule Christians with such vehemence. I suppose if you have been abused by a Christian in the name of his religion, then okay. I understand your anger a little bit.  If your excuse is simply that Christians are stupid and you find that offensive, then you're no better than those who ridicule people with Down's Syndrome or the disabled. I don't get it. As a believer, I've never seen the need to write posts that ridicule atheists. I might disagree with you, argue politely with you, but in the end you guys have every right to believe what you want to believe.  I kind of wonder how secure some of you are in that belief system, when you seem to need to attack the beliefs of others to reaffirm your own.

I examined atheism, agnosticism, Eastern mysticism and a wide range of belief systems and philosophies before coming to my conviction that Christianity made sense. Did you do the same or is yours an emotional conviction? I'm not being snarky here. You really seem to have some deep seated anger at Christians. You can't have known many genuine ones.

Like any belief system, there are those who are principled followers and those who are phonys. Take environmentalists, for instance. There are those who truly believe we should care for the planet we live on (I count myself as one) and those who make a tidy profit by spouting the rhetoric because they can make money doing it. The same thing happens with Christianity. There's a long history of politicians and entitled "nobles" using Christianity for their own purposes. This doesn't make the Christian belief system evil any more than the fundamental principles of environmentalism are evil because corporations manipulate fears of global warming in order to corner markets on those twirly glourescent light bulbs.

I worked for a tiger refuge that was seeking to use modern genetic science to recover lost species of tiger. It was a wonderful idea, bringing back extinct species whose genetic traits are still left in hybrids found in zoos and private collections. Some people called them junk tigers and were very critical of the refuge for even thinking about such a thing. When I looked into what was going on, I discovered that it was pretty much all about who would get the big foundation and government grants. The ideological purity, in the end, was about funding the different faction's projects.

Are there people who simply care about preserving the tigers? Yes. Are there others exploiting the conflict for profit. You bet. All human beings choose whether to live by their principles or to serve their own needs. I've worked in nonprofits, educational institutions and as a community organizer for more than 30 years. I'm a conservative (some of my liberal colleagues think I should spontaneously combust). I've started 5 nonprofit organizations (and they don't call them that for nothing). I've worked hard to help change unfair government practices so that old people, people with disabilities and low income families in my community have better access to transportation so they can better support themselves. I've pulled together coalitions of people from all sorts of philosophical backgrounds. I was proud to be a part of that.

I've never seen ridicule of someone else's beliefs do any good for a community, state or nation. I do have frank and open discussions with people from all sorts of philosophical backgrounds. We learn from each other that way. Most of all we learn to respect each other. My own belief is that every man has a God-shaped hole in them and that wherever we start from we're all looking to find that missing part of us. Your journey is different from mine.

Your criticism of Christianity has some merit. Like all philosophies, it can have people and institutions who claim to be honest adherants, but use believers for their own purposes. Don't confuse politicians with believers.

Christians truly do believe we should treat others the way we want to be treated. That one powerful philosophy has changed the world in profound ways. Over time that belief system has overcome the old ways. We've gone from the idea that strength is right to the idea that strength should serve the right. In many ways, our current culture, which embraces the idea that we should help and defend the poor and downtrodden, is a direct result of centuries of teaching out children the golden rule. Ironically, this sea change in culture, fueled by fundamental Christian beliefs about "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you" is the reason you folk of the atheist persuasion have the right to NOT believe in God and to vocally promote that belief without fearing for your life. Christians, in large part, gave that freedom to you. There are some folks out there who get a little self-righteous and do the same type of thing you just did in this article and belittle folks who don't share their beliefs. They are wrong to do so.

I hope you'll reconsider your attitude toward Christianity as a whole. We're pretty nice people whether you share our beliefs or not. We really do believe in the golden Rule. Diversity has to work both ways. If there is a place for non-Christian philosophies, then there must also be a place for Christians, whether or not we're the majority opinion. You can believe we're all naieve and stupid and wasting our lives on a false idea, if you want. You have that right. We can, in exactly the same way, believe that there are people who will not go to heaven because they choose not to and are wasting their lives on false beliefs. It cuts both ways. At the very least we can agree to disagree and respect each other's right to do so. It certainly doesn't hurt me for you to believe what you believe and it doesn't hurt you for me to believe in God.

So, how about we put down the poison pens, okay? That goes for you who call yourself Christians too!

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

The "Aha!" experience.

I once did therapy sessions and served as program director at the  Odyssey Harbor Ranch campus while I was in grad school studying Rehab Counseling Psychology. Odyssey Harbor was a residential treatment center for children and youth with multiple psychiatric and physical diagnoses.  I was responsible for the Bear's Den, a dorm for kids ages 6 to 10.

PH was one of the more interesting kids I treated. I had started a self-government in the Bears Den where the kids elected a dorm captain every week. It was a popular vote thing and you couldn't be on any kind of restriction to be dorm captain. The kids met on Fridays to determine consequences for some transgressions where that was appropriate. The dorm captain was the dorm's representative with me and he was the guy that got them special activities, privileges or treats. PH wanted to be dorm captain so badly that it hurt.

The kids didn't like him and he knew it. He complained to me in therapy one day, "I don't know why they don't like me," he shook his head in bewilderment. "I done beat up every kid in that dorm and still they won't pick me for dorm captain."

I was beginning to see a little distorted thinking going on. I tried to help him see that beating people up probably wasn't the best way to win a popular election, but the idea was totally outside his cultural paradigm. In PH's world, if you want to be the boss and be respected, you intimidate everyone else. Unfortunately for his popularity, the world we had constructed in the Bear's Den was ruled by law. It was a democracy and the citizens of that little world could exert power over their world with their secret ballot vote.  No matter how small they were, staff would protect their right to vote. No one could effectively control by bullying as PH had discovered.

That week PH was caught in the Bear's Den restroom doing some experimenting he shouldn't have been doing with another boy. Since it was on their turf, the kids voted to restrict both boys to campus for two weeks. I had to invoke a supreme court decision to prevent them from voting to take a more Mohammedan approach to punishment that involved amputation of offending parts. I explained that that according to our constitution, that punishment was not on the list of acceptable consequences. They relented at last (there was a lot of pent up anger at both boys because of their bullying).  They finally chose to issue both boys a one-and-one sentence that allowed for a pardon/parole the second week, but only if the dorm voted unanimously to let them off with 1 week time served. This was a very powerful teaching tool and often worked well, especially with kids who had any cognitive ability whatever. They were pretty fair about it since any one of them might face a jury of his peers at any time.

In two weeks the group was going to a baseball game and PH wanted desperately to go. He was an angel for that first week. He was helpful to the younger boys, respectful to staff and amazingly well-behaved. He told me in therapy that he was "trying real hard" to be good so the other boys would vote to give him that second week pardon. Fortunately for PH, the Bears Den boys had pretty short memories.

He came to me in therapy the next week almost giddy with excitement and it wasn't just over the upcoming baseball outing. The kids had not only voted him a pardon for the second week of his punishment so he could go to the game, but in the same session they also voted him Dorm Captain. The other boy had been awful that week and wound up serving the second week of his punishment and missing the ball game.

PH told me the whole story and then cocked his head as though a new thought had struck him. "You know," he said with the air of someone imparting a great truth, "If you are nice to people they like you!"

Following that revelation, PH's behavior improved so dramatically that he went home for good just 4 months later.

It was the most profound success I ever had doing cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Romans 8:28 promises that all things work together for good to them that love God.  I wonder if that's also true for those whom God loves, which is basically everybody.

I suspect that's true. No matter how we finally choose in the great "As for me and my house, we shall follow...."  decision, I think God gives us every opportunity to have that great "Aha" moment in our lives. I think everyone comes to it and either embraces the light or chooses the dark. George Lucas was on the right track with the cave scene in Star Wars. We face the dark and light throughout our lives, but in one moment of startling clarity, we all see two paths stretching before us.  There is a narrow, less well-trodden path uphill toward the light and a wide, easy glittering road sloping down toward a place deliberately kept obscured beyond broad twists and bends by those who keep the path well greased.

And at that moment we choose.

And at that moment we are forever changed. 

As Robert Frost so eloquently put it, "I chose the road less traveled and that has made all the difference."

Tom King

 

Why the Birthers Need to Back Off!

"The birthers"? Now we've got the "Obama was born in Kenya" crowd calling themselves by the kook name given to them by the media?   PLEASE, you guys. We're getting some real work done right now. We're discrediting Obama's staff. We're discrediting his policies by reading the actual legislation to a public that never would have read it for themselves. Obama's approval rating is plunging.

Whether he has a legitimate birth certificate or not, this "birther" thing is playing to his advantage. If he doesn't have one, he's got the judges to keep this dinking around in the lower courts forever. Meanwhile the media, the late-night TV talk shows, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live dismissively call you "birthers" and make you look like kooks. If he does have a legit birth certificate, he can let them keep tormenting you till it is to his advantage and then, voila, he tosses out the real deal as a smoke screen to cover up something really awful he's trying to get across at the time. The man's good at misdirection and sleight of hand. The sympathy that releasing the real "BC" would generate for him with the American public would thoroughly discredit conservatives by association. BHO can dodge this for years. Better to focus on 2010, elect a new congress and then get a "show your birth certificate" provision written into law before the 2012 election.

One self-proclaimed "birther" even suggested we start using Saul Alinsky's techniques against the left.  I'm here to tell you - we don't want to use the Alinsky playbook!  Better to lose the fight than to lose our soul.  The Alinsky method involves deception, manipulation, willful and deliberate damage to the country in order to seize power for your cause. That is not a place honest Americans should go -- EVER. The left has one tool to use against us that we cannot and should never use -- the belief that it's okay to lie if your cause is righteous. So long as you believe you are right, Alinsky and Marx see no problem in creating massive deception to get the power you need to force your beliefs on others.

That's why I'm always nagging conservatives to be absolutely certain sure we are telling the truth when we present our arguments. The truth, certain, sure and always is the ONLY tool we have against organized lying. When we pick up lies as tools ourselves, we join the dark side. I don't care how good the story is or how much we wish it were true. Let's wait for the facts before we use them in an argument.

That's all I'm saying.

Tom

Climate of Fear: The War for America's Shy People

The rhetoric in this countryhas become ridiculous - on both sides! Saying this will not get me a large audience as a blogger. Many conservatives have decided that telling lies is okay as long as your intent is good. The hard left has been doing so for years. Wild stories and inflammatory language is one way to have a popular blog, though.

Me, I'm congenitally unable to do some of the things you have to do to be a successful blogger - among those, tell "good" stories if I know them to be untrue. I'm not very good at writing to be search engine optimized. It seems dishonest to write so that you repeat key words that are popular search words on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest. Technically, I should find a way to mention, for instance, Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, Chappaquiddick, Robert Novak, Michael Jackson or Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Dane (some sort of romantick entanglement I believe). All these are high on the most often searched list of keywords this week. Unfortunately, four years of Mrs. Creel's English classes taught me the evils of artificial writing and I cannot do it and feel good about myself, no matter if it would help me get one million "hits".

If I wanted to rile up some conservative readers and win their allegiance, I should mention Van Jones, Glenn Beck or Town Hall. I do, if I have something to say about those things, but writing an article where I repeat those names simply to get the search engine to move me up in a word search seems as disingenuous as Michael Savage calling himself by his full name instead of using pronouns like "I" or "me". Makes me want to smack him!

According to master blogger, Robert Stacy McCain, some other tricks include finding ways to insert popular women in not much clothing into your blog, picking fights so that you gain lots of enemies and spending a LOT of time self-promoting.

Ah, well, I guess I didn't really want to be a wildly successful blogger anyway. I think I'd rather write honestly. I sleep better at night that way.

Now that I've wandered off topic, let me get back to it. I read a piece in which a liberal someone had gone to a town hall and waved around a map with Iraq on it. He found (surprise, surprise) that 75% of those who opposed Obama's health care initiative were:

1. Unable to find Iraq on a map though it was brightly colored and in the center of the map.

2. All stupid white people who only memorized anti-health care junk that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity had sent them by e-mail or were paid by some mega-insurance companies that had paid them to spread lies about Obamacare.

3. All were probably either on Medicare or Veteran's Care and were hypocrites anyway.

Again I am shocked.

Okay, that was sarcasm. I admit it. It's just that once again, we're getting the same old Democrat tactic. I remember it from high school where it was a popular way to keep the cool kids in power. No matter what happens, if you don't believe and act the way the popular kids did, you were labeled stupid and ignorant even if you have a 139 IQ, a 4.0 GPA and actually knew what you are talking about.

It's the rhetorical equivalent of the masterful comeback, "Oh, yeah!" The Democrats are masters of it.

They'er using it to marginalize the frighteningly large numbers of angry mainstream Americans who are showing up for Health Care Town Hall meetings this summer. The target to be intimidated and "guided" into correct liberal thinking by this particular anti-free speech campaign, however, is not the mythical moderates. It's not conservatives. It's not even the liberal base that supports the health care takeover. This tactic is aimed at people who, by nature, don't want to make a fuss. They don't want to get into a screaming match. They don't want anybody to be mad at them and they do not want to be thought of as "different". This is the group that is truly the swing vote in US elections. They are the go-alongs. It takes a lot to move them and fear that something bad will happen that will upset their world is one of the biggest things that motivates them to action. It takes a lot to get these guys out to a town hall meeting. It is not in their nature to go against anything, much less their duly elected congressman or woman. They don't really understand all the ramifications of political stuff like this because it really doesn't concern them. Only when something threatens the health, comfort and safety of their families. Why else do you think the message is, "Don't worry. Health Care Reform won't hurt you. It will make everything good for all Americans. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....."

If you go to a town hall, watch how these plain simple folk react when they get really angry at their congressman. Watch them shake their heads as they speak. It's as though they are saying "No, no, no, no, no..." all the time they are confronting this powerful person that they may actually have voted for because they were comfortable with him. They don't want to be there. They don't want to confront this person. They look over at the union guys and the liberal plants sent there to intimidate them and they just flat want to go home and hide. Even their body language says "I don't like doing this."

The problem is that even if they agree with someone, if that person or group resorts to the tactics of shouting, fear and intimidation, they drive those same people away. It's a careful dance between just enough intimidation and too much. Joe McCarthy failed to understand that back in the early 50's. He was right about Communists infiltrating Hollywood. It really was happening. Americans were frightened by it. But when he resorted to Gestapo like tactics, he lost America's shy people. There was a point in the McCarthy hearings where the country gave a collective cringe and turned off their radios. After that, no one cared how much of what he said was true. They weren't listening anymore.

At first, Washington, the Adams boys, Jefferson and Patrick Henry were considered rabble rousers and the American colonists by and large really didn't want to hear them. Mel Gibson captured the sentiment in his character's reaction to the revolution in "The Patriot". He just wanted to take care of his kids and his farm. He wasn't looking to confront power. He knew what the cost would be and he shrank from paying that cost.

I don't blame him. I don't blame any of the grandmas and grandpas that have driven to the town halls in their pickups and big grandma Buicks. It happened during the Revolution. Britain got cocky and pushed their grab for power too far too fast. They made the silent majority, the shy people of America fear for their way of life.

That's what's happening in the first months of the Obama administration. They chose the quick grab for power over the slow, steady approach. The Cap and Trade and Health Care Initiatives are the equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass in football. I think they've decided that this is the last chance for socialism and if they risk it all on this one roll of the dice, they can win!

Bloggers, talk show hosts and conservative action groups are fighting a delaying action, hoping Americans will wake up to what's happeing before it's too late. We need to block that Hail Mary pass or time may actually run out on us. We'll be left with a frightening new system of government with the power to destroy all opposition in its way.

Delay and Sound the Alarm!

We need night riders like Paul Revere to wake up the country to its peril. We also need the informants that found out the British were coming and where they were going to. Soon we'll need the patriots at the bridge standing toe to toe with a foe that is disciplined, well-armed and confident. But on that day, which side will America's shy people be standing behind? That's the critical factor in whether we win or lose in this fight for freedom.

I think I can tell you which side they'll take. It'll be the side that best convinces them it can protect their way of life - the things they most value. The side that best articulates its case without malice or brutality (or at least without the appearance of malice and cruelty) will carry the field. As Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the original Martin Luther and Jesus Christ himself demonstrated, it may require some of us to have nerves of steel - the ability to hold our fire till we see the whites of their eyes. We may have to risk our lives and our honor, our wealth and our safety. Some of us may be ruined in the effort. Some may not survive. The way to win may well be for enough of us to go down with dignity and reveal the foe as a cruel tyrant by his behavior. We may lose talk radio, conservative news, religious broadcasting and independent publications before it's over. We may lose a lot of things we value before America fully wakes.

I hope not.

In this current, and what I believe may be final, conflict, we must tell the truth, no matter what. We must not pass along lies and rumors just because it works to make people believe like we do. Our opponents do that very well. They lie themselves and then convict us in the press of lies we never told. They make up things to support their agenda, no matter whether they are the truth or not. We must not do that too! We must not resort to the tactics of Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini Saddam Hussein and their ilk simply because lying is an effective tool to get what you want.

Let us be careful in this conflict to tell the truth. I'm listening to both sides and there are many out there who believe that what our government is trying to do is wrong. Many tell the truth scrupulously no matter what their critics say to the contrary. Others say exciting things that will get them ratings without any concern for whether the things they say are true or not. If it sounds good, they'll use it. I get a dozen e-mails a day from people I care very much for with stories in them that are lies. They are great stories and may make me mad at people I should be mad at. Nonetheless they are lies and we hurt ourselves by telling them.

It is harder for a righteous man to fight a war. There are weapons we may not use; tactics in which we may not engage. The clerk at my local grocery store believes that Jesus's coming is imminent. That may well be the answer to the prayer that many freedom-loving Americans have been praying lately.

God help us!

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