BEWARE FAKE NEWS

“BEWARE OF FAKE NEWS”

The recent admonition from Pope Francis should ignite the Christian community into a tsunami of global support, and yet it caused hardly a ripple. His message is that deception, or “fake news”, hasn’t changed much since the beginning of history, and that the consequences of believing the same lies are still devastating. The Pontiff’s call is to reject the vicious arguments over good and evil that guarantee division and result in grotesque violence and suffering. We should all simply acknowledge that human beings only form opinions, and our judgement quickly changes if the “evidence” is altered. It is surely time to hold all those who alter “facts” to suit their preferred narrative accountable for the mayhem that they cause.

A good place to start might be by reminding bible scholars that the “fruit” of the forbidden tree is not an apple! The original lie was to slander the motives of God, thereby justifying the arrogance of challenging His authority. The rebellion of the human species was the claim that “it isn’t fair to expect obedience if the one in charge is just on a power trip and will not allow any competition for their position”. The simple truth is that people cannot improve on perfect justice, so God set one reasonable and necessary limit – we had to leave the judgement of good and evil up to Him or our perfect existence would be over and our lives would become nightmares filled with vain arguments, madness and self-inflicted tragedy.

This is a great example of how “fake news” works. By adding an apple to the story it changes the conflict from man’s inability to judge good and evil into a simple act of disobedience to a higher power who seems to have a phobia about apples. This terrifying vision of divine outrage creates an opportunity for all the major religions to offer exclusive sanctuary to their own faithful followers who obey the messages delivered by “authorized clerics”, when the true message of holiness insists that every individual listens to God themselves. This was the message of Jesus, and this is the only way to distill any truth from the suffocating fog of opinion and fiction provided by fake news, junk science, bastardized religion and false narratives that populate the airwaves.

Hopefully the day approaches when vast numbers of people will recognize the universal, self-evident fundamentals of God’s love and patience and we can put an end to the lies that cause all this misery.