Tagged: faith
Again, Machiavelli Has Resoundingly Won and Yet I’m Not Dead: A Short Account of a Good Day.
My YouTube feed includes political memes, for whatever reason.
I just watched one which had President Biden, back in 2006, stating adamantly that marriage was between a man and a woman.
Apparently today, in some form or fashion, he supported the opposite.
If you haven’t read The Prince by Machiavelli, I don’t know that I can recommend it to you. But to summarize it must be equally as bad, so I’m not sure what to do. Proceed at your own risk, I guess.
The rock and hard place that we live between may best be illustrated by calling your attention to this event (Biden saying whatever is necessary to win—even directly lying) and also to the decision and technological capability to comprehensively investigate the missiles which landed in Poland before invoking Article 5.
Machiavellian leadership is rooted in evil and yet we have remained short of WW3 in a world which is ruled by it.
At this point, I wouldn’t trade one for the other.
You’re Next
That’s the title of a sermon I’d like to give.
“You’re Next?”
Intriguing, no?
“Next what?” you wonder.
Whoa, back up a sec, I say.
“Who am I giving the imaginary sermon to?” That’s the first question.
My answer: This is a real sermon, for a real congregation, at a real church.
Most folks in the audience, then, believe they’re “in”.
This eliminates my ominous assertion “You’re Next” from meaning (to these faithful few) something positive.
Instead, I mean, literally, concretely, and practically, that I believe I am talking to people who—like all the rest—are the next to leave Christianity.
“No I’m not!” some of you might respond.
“Now we’re talking!” I exclaim. “You’re not next after all. So why aren’t you gonna leave? Let’s talk about that and see if we can’t communicate all the reasons you’re hanging around to those who are not here today.
“For example, I’m not going to leave because I can read my Bible. And when I read the Bible, I see that, specifically, theology has mucked up what it says. Doctrine begins with Scripture. Doctrine does not prevent taking the claims of the Bible in kind.
“That said, you’re not going to hear me proclaiming ‘doctrine’. Not unless we do this together for decades and I need to speed up the point I want to make. Decades. Not this week. Not next week. Not next year. Not even next decade.
“Open your Bibles with me, then, to the Gospel according to-”
“-Excuse, me,” one of you interrupts. “But how will we keep false teachings out?”
“Good question. By using our god-given minds to determine what the Bible says. If this makes you nervous, it means that you’re not sure you know how to read. That’s fine. I’m sure I can teach you. More than that, I’m sure you’ll agree that you learned how to read.
“Any more questions before we begin?”
Life Doesn’t Have To Be Hard, It Turns Out
I think I enjoy the competition. I enjoy challenges. I like to prove myself. I like to prove that I am better than you expected.
Yes, I think that is why I have lived life in a way that I (and others) might sometimes define as “hard”.
Wearing a boy scout uniform was hard. Witnessing to non-christians as a pre-teen was hard. Being a diver on the swim team was hard. Going to a college where I knew no one was hard. Entering bodybuilding competitions as a teenager was hard. Getting good grades was hard. Becoming an Air Force officer and pilot was hard. Arguing with every living person has always been hard.
These activities have also been fun, but that doesn’t mean they were less hard.
But I have recently spent an inordinate amount of time with people from a different culture and I have come to realize that life doesn’t have to be hard.
The trick to this type of life, so far as I can tell, is to not understand anything.
My goal—if this post has one—is to distinguish “ignorance is bliss” from what I’m talking about.
“Ignorance is bliss”, to me, has always been said by those who are not ignorant. It has always lived in the same semantic domain as “the thing I like about high school is, as I get older, the girls stay the same age”.
I’m not claiming to have rediscovered that concept.
I’m talking about hard vs. easy. Like the “work smarter, not harder” realm.
And I’m saying here I have been living a hard life and enjoying it because I thought that over time I am working smarter and smarter which means more and more work being done, but it turns out, I’m still living a hard life.
And I’m admitting that I just came to the realization that life doesn’t have to be hard.
Let me put it this way.
In the “work smarter not harder” proverb, there is implied that if you’re dumb, life is hard.
There’s another proverb I’ve heard, “being dumb doesn’t kill ya, it just makes you sweat.”
With me yet?
I think I’m saying that these aren’t true.
If you actually don’t understand life, then life is easy. Lillies of the field easy. Birds of the air easy. You know, easy.
Just be and in most cases food makes it to the table.
Just be and in most cases the Nike outlet will have a marked down pair of shoes in your size and on the very day that you went shopping there!
Just be and your kid can’t possibly turn out with low character because he is also only a receiver of life.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood the “just makes you sweat” part and it has always meant “working hard is dumb” to the wise.
Or maybe, just maybe, I have been working my tail off to provide a good life for my new family and the only actual reward is the knowledge that they prefer their old, easy life back.
And to think that for all these years I thought life had to be hard.
Guests Cannot Speak. Not Even Me.
Earlier today I wrote, “Evangelical Christianity has a problem.”
Just now, I returned from attending the second half of the youth service that my wife and step-son’s preferred church puts on. I missed the games and whatever they do for the first hour. This means I arrived when the sermon began. Then it was small group time.
Twenty minutes is all they allot for the smaller groups time.
I’ve been to this church several times, and have been to a few of its members homes. And we sent A- to the youth camp two years ago etc.
I would never join the church, however, because it’s a “one church, many campuses” place that makes you watch a screen for the pre-recorded sermon.
Think of it. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. Visual Illusion.
One of these things isn’t like the others.
Anyhow.
During small group time, the two adults (one is a paid, full-time youth pastor who I’ve spoken with at length and texted and talked to occasionally) were teaching the 7th and 8th graders (one of whom was dressed in full Spiderman costume, gloves and all) about not drawing lines when it comes to lust/pornography. As in, do not say, “I’ll go this far—and no farther.” Instead, the lesson was, “whatever is pure…think on these things”.
No problem with the lesson.
But the boys were not getting it.
The way the leaders, sermon guy and two in my group, spoke, barely anyone could’ve discerned what the heck they were saying. They were so general in their vocabulary that it was hard even for me to know what was going on. I wondered, “Were they instructed to never get specific? If so, that’s odd. But it fits these type of churches. Never actually offensive.”
Anyhow, the point is, the boys were saying things that didn’t fit at all and the adults were never correcting the boys or even seeming to care that the lesson was failing.
Finally, after 17 min, I said, “I’m not sure you guys get the line thing. Will one of you explain it? Can someone give me a specific example?”
Peter Parker spoke up, “It’s like you shouldn’t drink alcohol or do drugs.”
Before anyone could respond, the unpaid teacher actually answered me.
I was shocked. Not only did I not doubt that he knew the answer, I clearly didn’t ask him. And the protectionism he demonstrated was wholly inappropriate. I obviously was trying to help teach the boys what they, the teachers, wanted to teach the boys.
I repeated the question, albeit more specific, “What’s like a rule you have in your life right now?”
A boy spoke up, “Don’t watch bad tv.”
“Good,” I said. “Now what’s the very easiest way to make sure that you never, I mean never ever, see bad tv?”
“Read a book,” he answered.
“Perfect. That’s perfect. The line would be ‘watch only good tv’ but the better thing, if you never wanted to watch bad tv, would be to never watch tv period.”
Then the boys took over with other examples and the paid guy fed off the improved mood and everything came to a close.
Skip to the end…
The paid guy approached me and said, “Hey, so I just want to honor our leadership here and let you know that you need to wear a guest badge next time. You know, just so folks know you’re a parent.”
“Will do.”
“And,” he continued, “This comes from the heart, but we want parents to come and see what we’re teaching the kids, but you can’t talk. I mean, I loved what you said tonight and how it helped the conversation, but, again, I need to honor our leadership too and so you just need to know that you can’t talk next time.”
Boy Scouts really ruined me, I think.
In Boy Scouts, the adults taught skills. Like lighting a fire. We learned fire needed three things, blah blah blah.
All the adults either helped teach or were too embarrassed to help as they didn’t know what they were doing and not helping light a fire would result in no fire, so they just sat back and watched rather than shame themselves.
Can you imagine it? Many adults helping towards one goal?
Tonight, if the youth leaders wanted to teach the boys to light a fire, the analogy would work out as follows.
“Boys, here’s a match box. Take it. That’s right, there’s enough that every one gets one. Everyone have theirs? Good. Now you take a match and then strike it on the side and the match grows a flame. Your turn. Try it.”
And then one boy says, “This box sounds cool when you shake it.”
And another rejoins, “Yeah. Like moccasins.”
The teacher corrects, “You mean maracas.”
“That’s what I said. Maracas.”
All the while, the boys are all shaking a box of matches. But no fire is lit. No matches leave the boxes. No boys strikes up a match into a flame.
And the teachers just keep gently “handling” the ignorance.
Then I say, “Boys. Will one of you take out a match from your box?”
“I’ll do it!”
“Thank you. Now will you strike it on the side of the box and make a flame?”
(Shhhh sparkle flame)!!
The boys say, “Oooo. Ahhh. Can I try?”
Then, after the dismissal, the leader says to me, “Silence!!”
Tracking, dear reader?
Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I’m too eccentric. Maybe I have too much baggage.
I just have never been to so many organizations which have such lousy teachers as the Evangelical churches I have attended of late.
It’s not like I taught something different. I merely helped focus the lesson they wanted the boys to learn. In my opinion, I should get a medal for what I did tonight.
Evangelical Christianity has a problem.
The Bible Is Not Always Clear
The sermon this morning was on James 1:22-25. Here it is.
“But become doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he looked at himself and has gone away, he immediately forgot what kind of person he was. But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of freedom, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does.”
James 1:22-25 LSB
The preacher this morning spent an inordinate amount of time on the “common sense” mirror analogy. To summarize, he said, “Unless you’re a ‘doer’ James is saying it’s like you see bedhead in the mirror in the morning and then don’t fix it. Hearing-only is only seeing the mirror, James is saying. But we want to be ‘doers’, so we have to do something about what we see.”
This interpretation, of what you’ll see is an uncommon teaching, is incredibly flawed. See if you can follow me as I explain why.
Firstly, the mirror is never truth. The mirror is never reality.
Secondly, the Bible is not a mirror. As I was critiquing the sermon on the short drive home, my wife somehow defended the sermon with, “but the Bible is a mirror!” This exclamation was especially saddening as she knows better. To be clear, a quick, but exhaustive, search of the Bible shows that no Bible writer ever expressed as much. Of course they didn’t. It isn’t true. The Bible writers never wrote that the Bible is a mirror because the Bible is not a mirror. (This is because the Bible is true and mirrors are not.)
Thirdly, James plainly says that the hearer-only forgets without the mirror. When apart from the mirror, the hearer-only forgets.
Let’s take an example of forgetting. As a professional pilot, I wear a uniform when I fly. The uniform is what a professional pilot wears. You see me in a uniform, just the same as I see myself in a mirror in a uniform. You see pilots in uniforms, but—and you know this—uniforms aren’t the thing that makes him a pilot.
It’s a good look, the uniform. So I like to see myself in the mirror. “Yeah, that’s me. I’m a pilot. Cool.”
Now imagine that I walk away from the mirror and am unable to get the plane into the sky. Am I still a pilot? Even though I’m in uniform? (We’re still on point three; James’ emphasis is on forgetting.)
I saw the other pilots in their uniforms. I put on one that fit me. But, imagine that for some reason I couldn’t perform the task of flight. I have forgotten who I was/am. As it turns out, how I look has nothing to do with whether I am a pilot.
(Here insert any of your own reflective, superficial, outward traits.)
Fourthly, and finally, mirrors, in-and-of-themselves, are not compelling. Don’t believe me? Hmm. Okay. Then I guess you’re not slightly overweight, not slightly unkempt, good from this angle, and you don’t appear to weigh as much as the scale says. I guess you really do look best on video chat when it’s just your face, your clothes really don’t matter, and you’re only working from home—so no need to look nice.
If mirrors could compel us to change, we’d all look exact like we want to, no matter the cost of achieving it.
James was writing to liars (that includes you and me too). Specifically, he was writing to believers who were undergoing various trials. James believes that he (James) knows a thing or two about how to gain the righteousness of God. And he writes that we don’t gain the righteousness of God by living a lie. Or as James says “deluding ourselves”.
If you think hearing a sermon every week, or your having heard a powerful sermon once in your life, is going to gain you the righteousness of God, then think again.
This short passage is not clear. It is not common sense. It is murky, it is mysterious, and it is deep enough that a lifetime can be spent contemplating it. This is because James is promoting the need for religion. He is promoting the need for repetition. He is promoting the need for repentance.
Why? Why repent? Why repetitively perform good works? Why get religion?
Answer: “To achieve the righteousness of God.”
(Here notice that we haven’t touched on what that is. Maybe some other day.)
“One Pastor Candidate for Every Five Pastor Openings”
Have you heard this one? I just heard it the other day.
I’ve been generally aware of the “pastor shortage” or, put differently, the “need for pastors,” but the other day after a men’s Bible study, a church member shared this doozy with me.
You see, the local church my family will probably join is between pastors at the moment and it’s been seven months. They have stalled in the search, basically taking the past seven months to write a church profile with only two salient facts in my view: low attendance (50-60 a Sunday) and minimal budget (somewhere around $150k a year).
But now, with only depressing effect, there’s this fact in the mix. Only one pastor is available for every five congregations looking for a pastor, or in need of a pastor.
I say, let’s honor the rumor and explore what it may mean. Like from a God’s eye view. For example, are we saying that God isn’t providing shepherds for His flocks? Seems unlikely. What are some other options?
One other option, possibly the only other option, is that the pastor-less churches aren’t churches.
Boom.
Consider that.
What would that mean? What would we be saying if we concluded that four of five pastor-less churches aren’t “churches”?
I’ve been thinking about this question all week. And the answer, as I see it, is not as surprising as you might guess.
What does it mean that four of five pastor-less churches aren’t actually “churches”?
It means people aren’t religious anymore.
And that fact is not surprising at all. It’s quite mundane really. It’s not even embarrassing. It’s “just the way it is”.
Specifically though, or more acutely, it means that these pastor-less groups, are viewed by men like me (or men I went to seminary with) as uninterested in religion. Instead they’re interested in having their way all the time, and won’t be moved from their opinions.
In the particular church I have been attending, the head deacon was curious about my opinion on whether the flag could be placed back behind the pulpit in the sanctuary. It seems the previous pastor took it down as an early order of business during his tenure.
The point here is not, “What did you tell him, Pete? We are having the same debate.”
The point is, “What man on earth, let alone man of the cloth, man called by Almighty God to preach the Word, wants to debate sanctuary decorations?” That’s not a Christian church problem, that is a personality problem. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
Step 1 of problem solving, Air Force Officer Training School style: Recognize The Problem. The problem here is not a pastor shortage, the problem here is a truth shortage.
The God of the Bible, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe is not afraid to use unpleasant truths to accomplish His will.
The truth is these groups of people long ago stopped being Christian churches. Everyone with children left—that’s the first sign. But more than that, churches grow. They also convert people. If so-called “churches” aren’t growing and aren’t gaining new converts for years, they’re not churches. This isn’t the end of the world. It’s the truth.
In conclusion, don’t put out a “Pastor Wanted” sign if you’re not a church.
And if you’re not a church, then the only public action for your group is prayer. If the “church” won’t pray together, then you’ve learned all you need to know. 1. It’s definitely not a church and 2. your two options then are evangelize or leave.
I say, why not evangelize? Most people are horrible at it and you’ve at least got a ready audience.
As for me and my particular situation, I’m attempting to practice what I preach here. I’m sticking with these folks, who otherwise are not a church, because they’re a ready audience and they need Gospel as much as the next man.
I Thought I Caused the Formula Shortage…
It’s true. I have been feeling guilty. I thought I caused the formula shortage.
I remember the date, the same as you do. February 25th. It was the day after Russia attacked an area of Russia held by a people called Ukrainians for the past 30+ years.
Can you blame me? I had a baby due in a week or two and, in a moment of weakness, thought, “I remember the toilet paper run of ‘20. I’m not gonna be caught without formula when the results of last night formally play out in six months.”
So I rushed to Walmart and purchased $500 of diapers and formula.
Essentially walk-lunging down the main vein aisle between groceries and large women’s lingerie, I finally made it to the diaper section. I was sweating, not from the exercise, but from fright, as I realized I’d need a cart for six or so huge diaper boxes, sizes ranging from 1-4, and didn’t know whether I could trust leaving them alone whilst I went back to find one.
Cart in hand, diaper boxes crashing to the floor with a volume that drew far too much attention to the supposed clandestine operation, I then thought, “And formula. My wife’s production slowed around the 6 month point with A- and so I should grab some formula.”
When I saw the $50 a can price, I balked and said, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll grab two today and then just casually pick up another each time I visit. Wouldn’t want to do anything crazy.”
Making my way back to the front, I over-waved to the Somalis who looked at me as I struggled to keep the items balanced in the cart. “Hi. Yes. That’s right. Keep your heads covered, ladies. Faces, too. Nothing to see there, just like nothing to see here. I just realized I have a baby coming! Stupid American dad is all! Haha!” I jested.
All the while I knew that, supplies in hand—bird in the bush, you know—my child would be a veritable uberman to their already disadvantaged offspring.
Credit card passed the chip detector test, and I was out the door.
Only one time did a box fall off the cart on the bumpy trip to the car, a fact which none of the passing meth heads seemed to notice, and I eventually made it.
My tiny, but fuel efficient, Nissan Versa Note could barely hold all the goodies. The backseat was certainly employed for the proud duty of transporting size 2 & 3.
Fast forward several weeks, through me declaring we are in WW3, pivoting to the realization that “Ukraine is not a country”, and suddenly, after seeing celebrity gossip unseat war and rumors of war, I began to hear there was a infant formula shortage.
Imagine my guilt.
Scratch that. Imagine my first gasp of guilt.
“Huo! Did I do that?”
Then some more time went by. Nights were filled with either heavy, short-lived sleep or EMS flights toting around ailing patients. (I might point out for your edification that one was a “mums the word” victim of a stabbing in only his underwear, which I took as a friendly reminder to “Be nice to yo’ wife, Pete…”)
But today the headlines got me again. So I googled it. What is causing the shortage, I wondered? Me?
The answer? Trump.
Lol. Or that’s what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson had to say. (Babylon Bee too.)
Whatever.
The important thing is—still perfect.
I have yet to make a mistake.
Step 2: Gather The Data
For review. Note the legend on the bottom left.
In short, the “red line” (which when crossed by Russians will trigger unmentionable alterations to our lives) is actually blue on this map.
Step 3 is “List all possible solutions.” I mention it so you know. But I’m still at Step 2.
One Fruitful (Hear: “Motivational”) Christian Perspective on Hegel’s “The ‘State’ as ‘Rational Life of Self-Conscious Freedom’”
Christians can read Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel fruitfully, if we downgrade slightly Hegel’s “belief” in the State as “self-knowing” to a “for fun, guys, let’s contemplate what religion looks like to the State if the State, itself, was the perfect being. The highest being.” (You may want to bookmark this one. It’s odd enough that you’ll need time to think it through for yourself.)
This downgrade must be made by the Christian, because otherwise Hegel actually competes with Moses, John and the others behind the Bible. And as far as that competition would be concerned, Hegel obviously loses because he does not promise eternal life, like the Bible writer’s do.
But! But, subsequent to the downgrade, Hegel’s conception of the State as a “concrete, self-aware being” is intriguing and can be useful to our Christian labors. How, you ask? Here’s how.
I haven’t been able find a reason to join a church. I haven’t. As most of you know, I grew up in church, left when I left for college, then moved away to the AF and from Christianity, and then ended up at a Christian seminary in a master’s program. While there, and just before there, I joined a black church, but the cultural divide was so great that it really doesn’t count as being a church member. The situation would be more accurately described by saying that both the real church members and I merely filled the role of “safe, outside consultants”.
Well, I’ve got a family now; there’ll be a grand total of three, not two, kids here in a matter of days. And I have a fourth working out her salvation elsewhere. And I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, that I have the Holy Spirit in me, that all should be done for the glory of God, and so I want to continue down the Christian way. But I struggle with the church membership bit. And I know I’m not alone. We all struggle with it, Christians and non-believers. Why join a church?
Well, here’s where Hegel’s modified look at the State comes in. If the State were this perfect being, then necessarily in our belief-in-this-being’s-perfection, we’d naturally agree with his, the State’s, perfect judgement. And on the matter of church membership, the State would encourage it.
Why? Because in the behavior of citizens being members of the local church (no matter the particular denominations etc.) the citizens are essentially “buying into” or “leaning into” or “doubling down on” their belief in the State.
Now, Hegel never mentions what I’m about to, but by my thinking the following runs through his thinking like a vein.
The idea here in this post, the simplified, fruitful version if Hegel’s idea, is not more complicated than to say without strong activity in the small institutions of the State (nation) by citizens, the big or overall institution (the nation) cannot be made as good as it could be made. Of course, underscoring this concept—and hopefully made clear by the post title’s “One Christian Perspective”—is the belief that the church is more than just a “small institution by which to make perfect the State.” What Christian reads the Bible and thinks “Oh! I get it. It’s like what Hegel said!”? But to a man of action like myself, the fact that this type of thinking moves me up from the comfort of the couch is the important part.
Would it move you up from the couch, unchurched Christian? Love of nation as the reason to stick out the undesirable parts of church membership?
If so, don’t tell me in the comments. Instead, look for me and my “bleed on the flag to keep the stripes red” love of country in church this weekend.
This Is Not COVID
The above image and caption is from the CDC site. https://www.cdc.gov/media/subtopic/images.htm
I could not emphasize enough that not one of you, nor I, can explain that caption.
If I break it down grammatically, like 8th grade sentence-diagramming, it says, “The particles contain cross-sections.”
What does that mean? Is there a problem when particles contain cross-sections?
Beyond this, “spherical extracellular viral”, and “through the viral genome”, and “seen as black dots” are also utterly unintelligible to me. To be clear, I’m saying that even after reading “seen as black dots,” it would be silly for me to say, “Oh, I see what you mean,” given that the entire image is black dots against a white backdrop.
COVID is black dots? Stop the press!! It’s all over my phone screen!
All this is on my mind partly because of that line I included in my recent “stupid” post about the stupidity of COVID illustrations, and partly because I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Closer To Truth” which is some sort of fun “X-Files”-feeling, state-of-physics-today (in layman’s terms) show. It generally accomplishes its purpose, but the other day one of the interviewees referred to an illustration to make his point about multiverses and the size of everything. This use of illustration to explain truth, then, triggered me again.
The simple fact is using illustrations to convey truth bothers me.
A little backstory: Before modern script writing, like alphabets and even syllabaries before them, man often used something like emoji’s to communicate across great distance, time or space. We might call them pictograms or hieroglyphs. And when it came to numbers, some cultures used certain animals to express differences between say hundreds, thousands, and whatever they thought (but couldn’t utter) was bigger than thousands. A cow might mean hundreds, a frog, thousands, and an infamous one to express the largest amount was a stick figure of a man apparently examining the grandness of the starry night with open arms. To our eyes and ears and minds, this fact—this use of pictograms by our ancestors—is intriguing at best, and downright embarrassing at worst. But here we are again, using artist’s renditions to explain “truth”.
So what should happen instead? Here’s an example. If you’re tempted to ask, “Is there a multiverse?” The person you’re asking should say, “That’s the wrong question.” (The physicists would admit that.) The right question is, “Will our children think the idea of a universe is a quaint, but obsolete understanding of things, in the category of earth-as-center?”
And my point here is not physics, but reasoning, dignity in fact, so I need to say that if my children are going to think in terms of multiverse, they’d be fools for doing so because of illustrations. This is no different than how I believe you’re foolish if any part of your atheism or belief in evolution comes from the illustrated sequence of a monkey gradually standing upright.
Same goes for COVID. Is there a new virus or illness or health issue on Earth? Whatever our opinion, we’d be foolish if we based it on an illustration.
Another example of getting at truth properly: I knew I could be a pilot because I saw planes fly.
And another (negatively): Not one writer of the Bible uses an illustration—whether clay, or ink, or tapestry—to persuade either their contemporary audience or us.
I must insist on decrying the use of illustration when it comes to truth because, interestingly enough, the experts keep using it. At its root, an illustration can only ever be truth in the sense that the illustration commissioner, upon reviewing the piece, says, “That’s exactly what’s in my mind.” That the illustration matches his imagination can be true, but that does not move the argument along. The further—and necessary—step of “…and what’s in my mind is truth,” is not contained in or advanced by the truth that the illustration matches the mind. The man behind the imagination still has work to do. The truth debate is between individuals. Talk to me. Use your words. I’ll listen.
Don’t be fooled, folks. If someone pulls out an illustration to answer your truth question, still or motion, assert your manhood or womanhood; give yourself dignity and ask them to use their words.
Captain’s Log 