I recently drove by a Christian Missionary Alliance church where their billboard had this posted message:

“The truth is ruined when it is s t r e t c h e d.”

This got me thinking about something that has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus (which I assumed was the meaning behind the message). Is the reality in which we as a society choose to live directly correspondent to the events as they happen in the world and the basic facts of how science and religion operate in the world, or is it a menagerie - a fantasy that we try to ideate in a consistent circle of dissatisfaction? Before you browse away from that loaded question, stick with me a bit and see if you haven’t entertained some of these thoughts before…

Truth these days seems really hard to nail down because of all the mutually conflicting stores and narratives about … well … just about anything. For a really mundane example let’s look at oat bran or just about anything that you hear reported on the Today Show having to do with health or lifestyle. First we heard that oat bran would cure of from cancer. Then we hear that all of that hub bub was not true. Then we heard that it would help with cancer prevention, but only in larger quantities of whole grain. Now Cheerios uses that as a campaign for cholesterol reduction - skim milk helps of course. We hear things about what to do with our children so they are not raised to be delinquent or even worse, killers some day. We read and hear about the ten best ways to trim up for the summer, the best new diet, etc.

Deep down we have to know that all of this marketing feeding itself is a load of crap. For all of that health business here’s the best solution: get off your butt and exercise and try to have fun at the same time, spend a lot of time with your kids and have fun while using every moment to teach them how to be a good and disciplined person, eat appropriate portions of food using all of the food groups in even that revised pyramid, and burn the same amount of calories that you are eating. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you are eating. If we all did at least that, the Today Show would have nothing left to say other than five minutes about Iraq and the Sudan followed by 30 minutes of celebrity gossip. Well, that and the latest news from The Biggest Loser since that is perhaps the only show that really shows you what the truth really is for looking and feeling better!

So here we can argue that this example reveals that a basic truth of personal and social responsibility that includes an obligation to stay healthy and help each other is stretched in large part because we like to stay numb to anything that calls our conduct into question and to put the needs of the other above that of our own. This way of stretching truth follows a form where our narrative of reality does not correspond to the world in which we really live. It is a kind of “hyper-narrative” removed enough from what we know to be true in fact that we can maintain a comfortable level of selfishness and narrowness of our own perception in principle. It is radical individuality as a guiding principle of life that is supported by vast industries and technologies to make it so. The fact remains that as humans, we remain at the top of the food chain because we have superior intellect and the ability to work as a team and self-organize better than anything else on the planet. Yet we try to maintain a sense of reality that severs us from that basic and primal feature of our existence to replace it with a false pretense that we can actually go it alone and be happier. Try telling that to the paleolithic man who decides to fend for himself against a sabretooth tiger. Without the rest of the tribe his desire for a good dinner gets a nasty ironic flip.

So one way of stretching the truth is to develop a narrative or idealism that has very little referent to reality partially by ignoring what we do not want to experience personally even though many others do. In this way we can make the present refer to anything we want it to, even if that referent does not really exist but as a figment of our imaginations. This is the crux of Marx’s famous statement about religion being an opiate and how capitalism’s logical conclusion is to exist as a system that only sustains itself where the outcome in human living is that one group will prosper and another will suffer and be oppressed. But adding this as a corrective “reality check” to a notion like the simulacrum from Baudrillard where there is no reality anymore, only this narrative we have developed that has no referent to reality anymore. This suggests that the ones who can maintain that status at the top of the system can also maintain any narrative they wish in which those in lesser positions of power are all but forced to accept as truly correspondent to reality. This would be the reality as it plays out as if you were standing right there in the middle of an event as it happened. True the interpretations of all who experience that reality would no doubt differe even slightly, but no one would deny that they were indeed there.

For as long as religion has existed, which is as long as humans have existed, this position of power to create reality has been at the center of the duties of the medicine man, the priest, etc. While the god or gods, animus, essence, whatever is the object of worship and power, those who limit and wield that power in the world are those who have the special privilege of being the closest to it. The heart of the Reformation in the Christian tradition was the severing of the political power of the priest from the power of God in order to establish a “priesthood of believers” as Martin Luther described it. In the founding days of the United States the notion of a religion not limited to the intellect where only the learned few have the keys to the kingdom spread like wildfire. In both instances, the idea was that God is not bound to any structure that humankind can build and maintain and therefore, all have equal access to God. Great idea, that is until one group or priesthood believes that as a collective they have the most accurate version of truth that best corresponds to reality which by necessity means that no one else does. That’s when sectarian movements and cults begin. But this has been a fact of religion since it has been around as well. There will always be a group or persons who believe they have the story right. That does not mean that the story they tell does not have parts they do not fully understand - even though if pressed they will try to come up with an answer even if it defies reasonable standards of logic for it to seem like they have the whole thing understood and right.

So I have been talking about two kinds of truth: the first is a logical-deductive kind of truth where a premise and conclusion are directly correspondent. For instance, saying “It’s sunny and warm outside, therefore I will put on my raincoat” makes far less sense than saying “It’s raining outside, therefore I will put on my raincoat.” If said person with raincoat on that hot day is witnessed robbing a grocery store and the prime suspect happens to have been seen with that same rain coat on, the former explanation of rain would probably not hold up that well in court at all unless they were entering an insanity plea. We are simply driven to find a better and more logical explanation for that lack of logic. The second kind of truth is more narrative in nature in which one’s narrative description of events correspond to reality and would match other descriptions of those events. So for instance if someone were to say “I saw the suspect with the raincoat rob the store” along with a few others, that first person’s description would seem both more legitimate and more credible. But if one person stated they saw the person with the raincoat rob the store and others said they saw someone with a sweatshirt rob the store, that first person’s narrative now seems less legitimate.

The problem with both of these ways of describing truth is that they rely on individual perceptions of things and a judgment on the probability that those individual perceptions present the most accurate picture of reality possible. This makes it far easier to root out instances when truth is stretched even to the point of uncovering an outright lie. Where this is problematic is when a collective can meet the conditions of both the narrative and realtiy or a reality by drafting a narrative that maintains an order that is completely self-referential. In this case tools such as fear, escapism, a sense of hope in some ideal, or basic use of intense propaganda can go a long way to create that reality for others. This does not only happen in the case of sectarian or cult groups where the charismatic leader or leaders maintain that sense of reality, but it can happen through our news media and the infamous “black lines” of the government that blot out portions of the entire story for public consumption. While this might protect the public and others involved in the story it still distorts the entire story and therefore, distances the narrative from reality. That is to say, when portions of any narrative are left out or augmented, even with the best intentions, the story no longer offers a direct correspondence to reality and the truth is therefore stretched.

Of course, one could rightly argue that any narrative account of things will be necessity leave out details and hence be removed from that immediate intuition of reality. This was a problem for philosopher Edmund Husserl and found its way into the heart of critical theory. The goal here was to get at that immediate and intuitive experience of things unbound by the fetters that our inexact articulation of things creates. But, and here I am venturing out a bit, having an experience that you cannot speak about because it is a little “stretched” from reality seems improbable and just boring. So truth and reality must be articulated somehow and we must also understand that once we articulate it, we are loading with our own mistakes and limitations our articulation creates. This is especially the case when we articulate anything about what we believe, feel, or reason about religion. In that case we dare articulate and disclose the nature of the unseen. If that is not loaded with issues that make it really easy and highly probable to stretch the truth with every utterance even to one’s self, please tell me what is! I guess the irony of that billboard is that the truth of which it speaks, no doubt the resurrection of Jesus, could be one of the most stretched out truths we know. But that’s where faith comes in… But before I digress further…

What this does mean is that there will always be those who write reality for us - those who know more, control more, have more power over the knowledge we consume and experience. The only corrective to this numb acceptance of how those in powerful and influential position in the social ladder would rather tell the story of reality is for the consumer of reality to participate in the story itself. I guess this might be one way that blogging helps the situation by more or less democratizing information flow. But this flood of information from individuals and those representing independent collectivities that all produce conflicting stories of reality and biases may only complicate the matter even more. So if we can co-author the reality around us, the way out of blind acceptance is to verify how a narrative corresponds with reality before we accept it. And this means never accepting any narrative of things in its entirety. But it does not mean that if we cannot find that correspondence to ignore or stop trying to come to a better understanding of things. It should mean that we push harder to get to the truth by sharpening our critical lenses. Settling for anything else might just subject us to believe in a world that does not really exist…! Still wondering what I am taling about if you got this far? Watch the film Wag the Dog for a good laugh. I would say watch I “Heart” Huckabees, but that is way to dense for even me…