Character Education     Click here to see the video

Dec. 11, 2016      Community Christian Church of Springfield,MO    

Roger Ray, pastor   

MLK Jr – I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weight evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction.

            The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals.

            We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

The intensity of our recent political campaign has spawned, beyond a lot of hand wringing and shouting, some new phrases that have found common usage in the media. We are said to be living in a “post-truth” or a “post-fact” era. Mika Brzezinski, disgusted with the way that Vice President – elect, Mike Pence, kept going on TV to say that Donald Trump did not say what we all had heard candidate Trump say the day before. She called it “Pencing” when any of the Trump surrogates were trying to walk back, obfuscate, or totally deny what their candidate had said or tweeted.

Propaganda is not necessarily bad. I would even say that almost all of the canonical gospels in the New Testament are, in a very real way, propaganda. The gospels tell a story about Jesus in a very laudatory way, sometimes using facts but more often massaging the historical narrative to make a point and to persuade readers to become a part of the Jesus movement.

We more often think of propaganda as used by the Nazis under the direction of Josef Goebbels that used prejudice, conspiracy theories, and outright lies to gain and maintain power. From the west we have often viewed the propaganda of the Soviet Union and Communist China with disbelief that anyone could be so gullible as to fall for it.

Blasé Pascal once said that, “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” There is, of course, no such thing as objective truth, or pure news, or entirely unvarnished facts. We can come close, but all of reality is interpreted through the lens of our experience, influenced by our senses and our instincts.

A propagandist like the writers of the gospels are not only not trying to deceive, they are trying to convey what they believe to be true with such enthusiasm that their exaggeration and overstatement is just a part of the way that they try to convey their truth. We could wish that they were more concerned with facts than with persuasion but I think that we can understand why they did what they did.

When, however, the Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, tells the parents living in Flint that their water is safe and they need not fear allowing their children to bath in it or drink it, then we have propaganda of another sort.

It was Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, who said rather prophetically the week before the election that the problem during the campaign was that the media took what Trump said literally but did not take him seriously while voters were taking Trump seriously but they did not take what he said literally. That refrain has been repeated quite often since then.

We are being told that much of what Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, General James Mattis, and certainly Kelly Ann Conway, say in public cannot fairly be taken literally. Which makes me think, why should we listen to them at all?

Though the impression that politicians lie has been a part of our common speech forever, I can’t recall a time when there seemed to be a plan to just tell so many lies so fast that the deception literally shouts down the truth. At first I thought it was just Kelly Ann Conway but then it seemed to be a technique employed by most of the Trump campaign surrogates on all of the talk shows. They just started talking, changing the subject, and spewing out so much misinformation, deceptive propaganda, and misdirection that the hosts were always just left sitting back in their seats, hardly knowing where to begin.

I have never seen speed lying as a technique before but it appears to be not only in use but it may be the official policy in our post-truth era. There has been a lot of talk recently about the influence of “fake news” on the recent election and on public opinion. The issue especially comes to a head in Donald Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose gullibility for conspiracy theories, hate speech, and fake news is legendary.

Flynn had worked in intelligence in the Obama administration but he was fired after two years because the intelligence he passed along was so often not only not true but was, in fact, outrageously and obviously not true.

The question that I believe is relevant to ask here is why do highly educated, professionally experienced, and even highly placed intelligence officials believe things that are clearly not true? Why, when 98% of environmental scientists agree that our planet’s climate is dangerously and rapidly being altered by the use of fossil fuels are there so many elected officials who swear that it isn’t true? And you can certainly ask this of most religious people in the world: Why do they hold onto beliefs that are clearly contradicted by evidence?

The reasons are not simple and I don’t want to say it is one thing when there are really many reasons. One of things that makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories and fake news is, forgive me for being so flat footed about this but, a whole lot of people suffer from paranoid personality disorders. This is true for liberals and conservatives. Because I have written a liberal ethics column for our local paper for so long, I have attracted a lot of people who, though they are liberals, also suffer from paranoid personality disorders. They may be attracted to me because I publish an article that says that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to our invasion but then, after they come to church for a couple of months, they want me to tell people that the CIA is putting mind control drugs in the chem trails of jets flying overhead.

People who suffer from paranoia need to believe that they are right about everything and that people who disagree with them are not only wrong but they are also evil. So, a lot of the extremity that we hear in conspiracy theories from both the left and the right have a great deal to do with mental illness and in such cases, logical argument is not only not effective, it can usually only serve to provoke. Poking a stick at people who are paranoid only drives them further into their delusional thinking. Some of you are thinking of a family member with whom you recently shared Thanksgiving dinner right now.

I don’t want to make light of any mental illness. It is a serious form of suffering and paranoia isolates people and destroys family but I am not sympathetic enough to allow paranoia to influence national or military policy… we have had quite enough of that. Treatment, counseling, compassion – sure – keys to the Pentagon or the Oval office…. Not so much.

Beyond mental illness there are character issues. What I mean is, people often believe what is clearly not true because they want to, because the lie serves their personal interests. I do not believe for a moment that the Koch brothers actually dispute climate science, they reject scientific fact because they have become unspeakably rich through fossil fuels and they are willing to destroy the planet as long as they get rich off of it.

People believe that their own religion is right and all others are wrong because they believe that their religion validates their race, their life style, their preferred form of government, and their religion holds out the promise of a piece of pie in the sky for themselves.

They often refuse to examine their religious beliefs because their religious beliefs serve their own interests. No thinking person could critically look at the beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Mormon Church, or, for that matter, any fundamentalist Christian Church or even the Catholic Church and continue to identify with the JW’s, the Mormons, the evangelicals, or the Catholics. But the absurdity of the religious claims never sinks in if they have a stronger bond to that group identity than they have a commitment to reality.

Still, there are many who believe fake news simply because they are gullible. Hysteria can be more entertaining than facts. The mere fact that Fox news is often dispensing fake news does not trump the fact that do it with beautiful blond women, sneering, condescending men, and a tone of anger that makes D and F students feel superior to A and B students.

When their politicians tell them lies that they want to hear, and their favorite fake news channel tells them lies that they want to hear and then, on Sundays, they go to a church where they are told lies that they want to hear, then you end up with a public that is wholly uninformed, who can be manipulated with fear and propaganda, and where people are terrified of Muslim extremists who may kill a dozen Americans a year while paying no attention to the fact that more than 30,000 are dying every year from heroin addiction and another 30,000 from gun shot wounds.

Our wisdom lesson today is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. who, fifty years ago, was bemoaning the fact that our education system was failing on two fronts: the first being that we are failing to teach people how to think criticially…. To be able to sift through all of the media, religious, and political input we receive and to be able to tell what it true and what is fake news. The other failure of education, King says, is that even when we do teach scientific and objective facts, we are not teaching character.

That is, some of the worst monsters of history were very intelligent, very educated people, who used their intellect and their information to do horrible things. It is not enough to teach people to think critically if we do not also teach them to prefer the truth over a lie.

In a time when so many of us are exposed to hundreds of messages every day through social media, how do you tell what is true and what is false? In far too many instances, we assume something is true if we agree with it and insist that it is false if we disagree with it. When we do that, the real issue is a character issue. When presented with evidence that challenges our beliefs, a person of character will feel the cognitive dissonance. They will feel obliged to think about it, to consider changing their beliefs or at least to reconsider them. But in the absence of a passion for the truth, a person will generally dig in their heels deeper and redouble their commitment to the falsehood.

There were always Americans who knew it was wrong to kill Indians. There were always Americans who knew it was wrong to enslave Africans.

There were always men in America who knew it was wrong to deny women the right to vote. There are men and women in the Congress and the Senate right now who have repeatedly voted against gay rights, against equal pay for women, against universal healthcare, and have voted against a living wage, who continue to deny climate science, who know that what they were doing was wrong, time after time after time but they did it, not out of a lack of information, but out of a lack of character.

Admittedly, some of them, especially our congressman, don’t understand the facts… that’s an IQ problem, but most of the people who vote against these social justice causes know all too well what they are doing is wrong.

George Orwell is said that, "In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."  You may not see yourself as being a revolutionary but, in the face of the challenges we are facing in our country and in the world at this juncture in history, we need to stop whining and get busy starting the revolution.

If our nation starts registering Muslims, I’m going to publicly convert to Islam. Now that the Trump administration has asked for a list of names of EPA employees who have attended climate change conferences, I’m going to do everything I can to counter climate science deniers and to defend our scientific community that is more interested in truth than in corporate profit.

Orwell also said that, "Truth is treason in an empire of lies." The sobering reality we must face is that we now live in an empire of lies that requires that people of character, people of conscience, have the courage to repeatedly commit the treason of telling the truth, no matter what.

¡Viva la Revolución!