TRUTH AND TRUST
I watched a panel discussion about the loss of privacy. One of the speakers made a very important statement about trust. He said if they had replaced the audience with monkeys, one could not expect them to sit beside each other in an orderly manner. They would fight.
Society is held together by trust. We trust that when we go to a movie, we will not have to do battle with the persons sitting next to us. We go to the store and we expect that we will not be murdered or raped in the parking lot. We believe that we live with next door neighbors, who may irritate us, but will not launch a grenade into our house.
But this is what is being destroyed in our society, trust. The weapons being used are race, sexism, economic disparity, religious differences, politics, etc. But, above all, the weapon being used is the lie. Something or someone is trying to destroy the very structures that makes human life possible. Is it politicians? Is it Islam? Is it the “spirit of the age?” Who is lying to us and what is misleading us?
One element that astounds me is that people will declare you untrustworthy if you are a Christian and they do so in a blanket fashion. If there is just cause for this accusation, then Christians need to take note and repent. But I don’t think this is the case. Mistrust is used as a weapon by all people, Christian, non-Christian, liberal, and conservative. It often happens because the ends justify the means (as the saying goes), so truth is cast aside like a piece of wadded up paper. The issue of trust is most certainly connected with the issue of truth.
Many consider truth to be an outdated concept. We make our own truth. But that is not truth, that is propaganda. If there is no truth, there can be no rule of law or science or confident medical practice. Truth exists. The question is, will we have the integrity to tell the trust and thereby be trustworthy?
We know that there many cultures where trust does not exist and we call them barbaric. I suggest that we all need to think about what is destroying us. White and black, rich and poor, urban and country, and any other dichotomy that you can think of, need to think long and hard about these things. What can we do to restore trust in our neighbor? What can we do to return to one nation (under God), a melting pot of cultures that become one people?
