It's Mostly True

A mostly white picture...

I considered for a moment simply reposting my thoughts from before, but that might be cheating. It’s an inherent problem with the purpose of this blog; that is, to post on what’s uppermost on my mind at the time I sit down to write. Because themes recur, because the same things happen in life and upset me the same way each time. Well, not exactly the same way. Which is why I feel comfortable talking about truth. Again.

It happened – as many upsetting things happen – on Facebook. (If not there, your blood can boil just as easily on Yahoo! News.) Yet another meme taking half-truths and spinning them into lies, and reposted by well-meaning (or perhaps not so well-meaning) people.

See, I’m a Christian who ends up siding with Democrats most of the time. If any of you regularly watch Fox News, then you know at least some people think I’m going to hell for that. And that may be true, but certainly not just because I’m a registered Democrat – that is completely ludicrous and completely un-Biblical.

And I think the reason such a ludicrous and un-Biblical statement can be made in confidence by those who make them is because we demand less from our own kind than those we oppose. Because Christians either support the Conservative Right, or they say nothing. Well I'm sick of it: I’ve decided to stop saying nothing. 

Christ never, for any purpose, told anything remotely like a lie. He didn’t even use lies to tell the truth. I don’t care if it’s good sentiment, if it’s a good prayer, if it’s good anything: saying someone said something when they never said it is a lie, and it’s wrong, and it’s un-Biblical, and it’s un-Christlike. If you want to copy and paste the text without claiming this or that person said it, you are absolutely free to do so. But to put those words into a famous person’s mouth to give it more credence than it may deserve on its own disgusts me; and by sharing those things without making sure the credit rests where it’s due disgusts me equally.

Google is a powerful search-engine. All I had to do was copy the text and paste it into the search, and the top three results were pages telling me the quote was being mis-attributed. It took ten seconds. But the problem is we don’t care that much. The sentiment is true, so who cares if the person never said it?

Well, the person you’re crediting might care. I know God cares when people claim “He helps those who help themselves” is Biblical, because it is decidedly not. Passages abound, rather, of God helping those who are completely unable to help themselves. And to be a Christian – whose whole life is meant to model the Kingdom of God – and display that same sentiment is to say that sentiment is Christian.

We must start caring about the truth. We must seek it out earnestly and endlessly and scrupulously, removing the slightest detail that is untrue from everything we say, post, share, or like – or correct and apologize when we learn it is untrue. We do not have the only market that sells truth, and we do not by our nature only ever sell truth, and we need to stop acting like we do.

Let's remember one thing, Christians: one sin makes us completely unholy; why doesn't one un-truth make the whole statement a lie?