Where do you get your truth?
Where would you say you get truth about the world from? If you’re a good Christian and say “The Bible” and leave it at that, you are open to being deceived. Don’t get me wrong, the Bible is the ultimate source of truth and really does give us the correct way to view the world and humanity. The problem is thinking it’s your only source of ‘truth’. Because all of us use multiple sources of information that we filter to establish our Truth that determines how we live our lives. And the kingdom of darkness excels at spinning deception around a kernel of truth that we’ll let through our filters.
If you say the Bible is your only source for truth, you’re ignoring all the other sources of information that you use to assemble your view on the world. And even if you are perfect in your understanding and interpretation of the Bible, if you’re accepting lies from these other sources, you will be deceived.
What are some other possible sources? Media (news, entertainment, social) is a huge one. Talking with family, friends and others throughout our days is probably second. I want to zero in on news media and social media.
By news media, I am mostly talking about television news and to some extent, news papers. Both in the traditional sense and the newer online distribution channels. As consumers of news, most people don’t have large chunks of time to investigate or dig into the context of what they’re told. So you depend on the news org to select which events are important enough to warrant your attention. And a camera lens will only see a very narrow slice of reality, so the news org selects which images to present and doesn’t present the vast majority of pictures or videos they capture. How much do you trust the news orgs to select the stories that are most important. And once selected, tell those stories in a way that is truthful?
If powerful people want to keep their evil hidden, they don’t need to control every reporter or news org. They only need to intimidate or buy off those who choose to try to tell the story they don’t want told. Until the advent of social media, we had no choice but to accept this. And most of us didn’t even suspect there was anything wrong with with. After all, we were told that reporters, editors, and all the others we trusted to keep us informed were honest, objective seekers of truth. We were told that by those exact same reporters, editors, etc.
Social media changed all that.