TRUTH
TRUTH If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. John 8:31-32
All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal. Psalm 119:160
In 1998 the Manic Street Preachers released their album This is my truth, tell me yours. The title came from a phrase attributed to Aneurin Bevan when opponents challenged his use of statistics in political debate. It was the mantra of society for at least a generation, which decided truth was only found in relation to observable and verifiable facts, all other truth was subjective. That generation has passed. Increasingly, observable and verifiable facts are not the basis for truth, these can be overruled by whatever one feels, knows, or decides is the case. As a society that subjectivity means we are inconsistent in how we handle truth. Sometimes we (correctly) insist that there are some things that we can know as true and we maintain there are actions which are without question wrong. But on other occasions, and especially when it comes to overarching world view claims, the only acknowledged and generally accepted truth is that there isn’t space for absolute truth claims.
And into this mêlée we have the phenomenon of posttruth, and the associated discussions about the role of facts and emotions in influencing opinion. Named by the Oxford English Dictionary as its word of 2016, ‘post-truth’ is defined as “an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.”55 Post-truth is not a new idea, it simply builds on a willingness to define truth based on what the individual decides is of primary importance. Separate to this is fake news. This is where incorrect, and often deliberately incorrect, news is created and shared to further one point of view, usually to the detriment of an opponent or rival. In the run up to the 2016 US presidential election there were reports that fake news was shared as widely as real news on social media.56 As the effectiveness of fake news has become apparent, the term has been adopted by politicians and campaigners as a way of dismissing opinions or voices that they disagree with or dislike. While different, both post-truth and fake news show our current awkward relationship with truth. Our society
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