Here and Now: Living in the Spirit

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Dick Staub urges Christians to live the life and walk the walk. It is a how-to book on lifestyle evangelism.

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The Dawn Mistaken for Dusk

A radical redesign of your whole ministry should be considered. The Internet enables a revolution in connectedness. [Digital E-Book: Microsoft Reader]

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Truth or Consequence

Os Guinness, Unriddling Our Times, Reflections On The Gathering Cultural Crisis, Baker Books, 1999, pp. 66, 67.
SoAmazing.com

Category: Social Issues
ISBN: 080105981X
Keywords: truth, manipulation, knowledge is power, freedom, John Locke, Walter Lippman, essential, Pope John Paul II, credibility, falsehood, bareface lies, aggressive marketing, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Ted Koppel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, free, Baker Books, Guinness, Os Guinness

"Two simple reasons reveal why truth is vital to all human beings, and especially to citizens of free democracies.

One reason is negative: Truth is essential to resist manipulation. If truth is dead and knowledge is power, then we are all vulnerable internally to passions and externally to manipulation. 'Where there is not law,' John Locke wrote, 'there is no freedom.' Today, however, the problem is deeper. For while we have law, we have law only and no truth by which to guide and restrain it. Therefore, law itself becomes a tool of manipulation. Thus Walter Lippmann goes further than Locke to speak to the modern condition: 'There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.'

A second is positive: Truth is essential as a basis for freedom and fulfillment. Most people today view freedom only negatively--freedom from authority and control. They forget the positive side of freedom--freedom for or freedom to be. But freedom is not the permission to do what we like; freedom is the power to do what we ought. Negative freedom is therefore never enough by itself, as it lacks content and purpose. Freedom requires truth and truth is freedom, for only when we know who we are and what we should be will we be able to do what we ought. As Pope John Paul II wrote, 'There is no freedom without truth.'

In America, trust is dissolving into 'credibility,' falsehood into what is 'inoperative,' and bareface lies into 'aggressive marketing.' Fifty years ago Simone Weil warned her fellow citizens in France, 'We live in an age so impregnated with lies that even the virtue of blood voluntarily sacrificed is insufficient to put us back on the path of truth.' Albert Camus wrote similarly of the difficulty of fighting a lie in the name of half-truth already shrunk to a quarter-truth. Or today news anchor Ted Koppel says, 'We have become so obsessed with facts that we have lost all touch with truth.'

Are there enough who still care? The pundits of postmodernism tell us that truth is dead and knowledge is power. We must assert the contrary. Knowledge is power, but truth is freedom. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his stand against tyranny show, the words of Jesus are neither a slogan nor a cliche but a necessity for free people: 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set your free.' "

SoAmazing Review: In Unriddling Our Times, Reflections on the Gathering Cultural Crisis, Guinness underlines the centrality of truth to personal and cultural health and freedom.

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"Now I can see that I am in error. Didn't the Shepherds warn us to beware of the flatterers, those deceivers who give false hope and deceitful encouragement? They are able to persuasively entice the careless into following their ways." Christian, pp. 165, 166, The Pilgrim's Progress,

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