This has been bugging me for a couple of days, and since I run the blog to let the bugs roam free … some more email, but this time from the author to an email list to me. The author? Former Redstate editor in chief and general far right-wing personality Erick Erickson. What is he purveying? It’s in support of some newsletter he’s trying to hawk, so I shall only quote the salient parts.
What is truth? The dictionary defines truth as “the quality or state of being true.” So then what is true? The dictionary defines true as “in accordance with fact or reality.” Scripture tells us that Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life.”
What does that mean? Well, in short, it means Jesus is reality — God is real and factual and existent. Christians are to walk in that truth. We, as Christians (assuming here that you are), have an obligation to fact and reality because Jesus is fact and reality. We harm our witness for the truth of the gospel when we are unwedded from fact and reality. We cannot say the resurrection is real when we say an ascertainable, real fact is false. No one will believe us.
Note this emphasis on truth. Almost everyone loves truth. Yes?
What is not allowed is your truth and my truth. The truth is in accord with facts and people talking about their own truth are talking about emotions more often than not. That leads me to this picture that is going around on conservative corners of social media. I drew the red BS on it.
This picture is designed to minimize concerns over the Wuhan coronavirus. But it is not true. It is not the truth. If Christians are supposed to walk in truth and be grounded in truth, then to disseminate this is to sin because this is such a willful distortion of truth as to be a lie. A lot of Christians on social media are sinning.
It’s quite a lovely sentiment which makes me want to applaud Erickson. Yes, yes, take down someone on your own side! He goes on to debunk all of the paranoid remarks on the whiteboard, with which I shan’t burden you, makes some speculative historical remarks, suggests how those might apply to today, and then journeys down a path leading to an allegedly hypocrisy by the mainstream media concerning the appellation “Wuhan virus” being supposedly racist, which I have not heard from anywhere but Erickson. And that brings us to this:
But, being honest and truthful, I really do think this has everything to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Team Trump as adopted a universal naming convention for a virus, but because it is Trump doing it, it must be racist.
And then, of course, Erickson goes on to justify his use of the Trump Derangement Syndrome phrase in view of the objective fact that Trump himself has no love for truth, only for advantage, and Erickson did so in the most eloquent and persuasive of terms.
Nyah, just kidding. Erickson ignored the entire subject. He ignores 16,000+ verified lies. He tars his ideological opponents with a goofy phrase, covers himself in the cloak of virtuous truth, closes the rips in the cloak with thread made of the mistakes your own side has made, and struts off as if he’s been persuasive.
Alas for him, I smell hypocrite, I smell someone who decided to join the side of Father of Lies, and has shucked any devotion to truth or intellectual honesty in the process.
And that just sort of drives me crazy.
