Just the Facts Please, Hold the Bravado

“Alternative beliefs” I can buy, but “alternative facts” ? The landscape is shifting, for sure, and my panorama is not what it used to be. Now, Truth has to go into battle with Falsehood on a daily basis. Contrasts and juxtapositions may be my bread and butter here, but I didn’t count on the kind that threaten to pull the rug right out from under us.

Essentially, I was pretty content trying to deepen my understanding of the different ways in which people seek to understand and shape their world through religious experience, leaving facts more or less intact.

The way we interpret facts definitely is all over the map, and we reach very different conclusions about how they point to God or perhaps don’t point to God, and what kind of God s/he may be, but still there are certain fundamentals that remain solid.

Now, though, the very reality of the sun rising and setting each day might be called into question. A simple walk in the woods could reveal different points of view on where the trees are located. Maybe this country wasn’t, in fact, founded on the premise that all people are created equal and that justice should be for all.

 

Going forward, what then are we going to be able to agree on?

It was right after the Women’s March last weekend that Kellyanne Conway appeared on TV, smiling broadly as usual, to support her colleague Sean Spicer in his bizarre insistence that the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd was much, much larger than the media had pathetically portrayed it. She and Chuck Todd went back and forth on this on “Meet the Press” until she came out with a real whopper:  “You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”

I watched this clip, and the most amazing thing to me was how she glided right through it, almost like a figure skater. There was absolutely no self-correction, or amendment or anything. It was as if the term had already gained common currency in our culture.

Apparently, and this is no surprise, she’s just following in the footsteps of her boss.

I found a recent (1/24/2017) column by Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune about how Trump claims to be just giving us what we know we really want: a vision of things that are always fabulous and huge. He even invented an oxymoronic term– “truthful hyperbole.” You could check with her, but I doubt that this is what Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” Read Page’s whole column here.

It’s also very unlikely that any self-respecting religion would espouse this kind of weirdness, either. I’m just starting to read a brand new book with a charming– or ridiculous, depending upon your perspective– title: A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway (Yale University Press, 2016). Since he’s the former Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and I think my husband said he met him once, I figure he’s trustworthy.

Fact is (if I can still use that expression and be believed), I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for volumes that claim to condense a whole lot of information in a very palatable way. I mean, we all have a lot to do. My upstairs bedroom still has an unpacked suitcase from a couple of weekends ago. So why not try to find shortcuts once in a while?

Anyway, in the opening chapter he begins by saying that religion is a way to answer the Big Questions (capitals only mine).

The universe was created by a power beyond itself that some call God, that continues to be interested and involved in what it has created. The individual religions all offer different versions of what the power called God is like and what it wants from us, but they all believe in its existence in some form or other. They tell us we are not alone in the universe. Beyond us there are other realities, other dimensions. We call them “supernatural” because they are outside the natural world, the world immediately available to our senses. (p. 2)

So it is entirely appropriate for there to be “different versions” of certain phenomena, like the perception of an Almighty, but not of other phenomena, like facts discernible in Nature, or numbers of people at a certain place at a certain time. Which gets us back to why it’s important for us to agree that yes, the sun does rise in the morning, or to be more precise it seems to rise because of how our planet moves, and yes, that definitely is the sun that we see shining through the trees.

Long live alternatives in many areas of life— alternative schools, alternative pathways, alternative ice cream flavors by all means!  But let’s protect facts over falsehoods whenever we need to, brushing off whatever threatens to cover or disguise them, the better to let Truth shine out over this great land.