How can we know what is true?

• We watch one news network that claims President Trump is destroying America, and we watch another news network that claims Trump is the savior of America. How do we know which political claim is true?
• We read of a scientist claiming climate change is a natural cycle with an ebb and flow and humans are not its cause. Then we read of another scientist claiming humans are the primary cause of climate change, with a disruption of nature that threatens our very existence. How do we know which scientific claim is fact and which is false?
• We also hear one pastor preaching that wealth and prosperity are signs of God’s blessing and poverty a lack of faith and another preaching that wealth inequality is the result of human greed and sin. How do we know which religious teaching should guide our faith?

How do we discern truth from untruth when “alternative” facts conflate with “established” facts? How do we know what is true and what is not?

These are the questions I ask and the answers I seek. Maybe you do as well. Today’s topic will review the very nature of knowledge. I hope that with this analysis we can re-assess and reclaim what we value, what we believe, and how we should conduct ourselves in the sacred interactions we call life.

There is a pervasive belief today that Christians are under attack in the United States of America. Christian bakers and florists are prosecuted for declining to provide services celebrating homosexual weddings. Christian hospitals have been forced to provide minors medical services they find immoral and contrary to the Christian faith. Christians witnessing to their faith outside of abortion clinics have been arrested and sentenced to prison. Even prayer has been outlawed. Our government has been weaponized against Christianity. These are today’s headlines. But are these headlines true?

• Are Christians being persecuted today just as they once were under Roman rule in the earliest days of Christianity?
• Are Christians being denied the right to exercise their beliefs in a manner consistent with their beliefs?

Or is Christian oppression and persecution a myth, a fanciful fabrication? Are Christians’ claims to be victims essentially rhetorical political tools to marginalize others and to impose a specific Christian ideology on all others, including other Christians?

These are the questions I ask and the answers I seek - maybe you as well. Today’s topic will challenge many popular assumptions and beliefs. I hope that with this analysis of our history, national culture, and Christian faith, we can reassess what we believe, reclaim what we value, and reconsider how we should conduct ourselves in the sacred interactions we call life.

We live in a polarized society.

Some perceive the current national direction as offering hope and restoration. Others anticipate only pain, despair, and loss. Yet although we openly battle over politics and social issues, the real battle is over our national self-identity. We are polarized and divided by conflicting visions of who we are and who we should be as a nation. Moreover, this struggle over our national self-identity has divided communities, split families, and destroyed friendships. Because of opposing political and social beliefs, we either avoid select topics in our conversations or skip family and social gatherings that include people whose politics offend us.

Should we try to bridge the political, social, and religious gaps that divide us? Should we seek to express what we think and believe, perhaps with the intent to change or convert the other to what we think and believe, Should we seek to listen and learn what another person thinks and believes so that we, accepting them as they are, can find some common ground between us? Or should we instead give up on people whose thoughts and beliefs we fervently and diametrically oppose?

These are the questions I ask and the answers I seek - maybe you as well.