Is Your "Journey in Truth" Protected Under Religious Freedom? Is Faith in Evidence One Kind of Evidence of Faith?
As society's retaliations against truth-seekers and truth-tellers continue to intensify, might Religious Freedom provide a needed sanctuary for those who speak out about inconvenient truths?
I’ve paused in my writing lately, partly because current events are overwhelming (and others are already covering them better than I would hope to) and partly because we’ve already been through these types of chaotic events so much that anything worth saying would need to be more a meta-story pattern insight than a genocide-du-jour report. I guess I’m experiencing a form of crisis fatigue.
The big problem— shifting society’s attention away from the propagandists’ narratives to truth— would be easy if all we needed to do was speak the truth and let it ripple out into the world. What makes it difficult is that truth-tellers are being attacked systematically. Truth-tellers can be ostracized and shunned socially, they can lose their jobs if their employers have policies against endorsing ideas that are off limits, they might lose their professional credentials if they’re unwilling to tow the party line at work. Some, journalists mainly, might even be intentionally targeted for elimination in war zones and written off as collateral damage.
Levels of suppression against truth-tellers are ratcheting up and I find myself using words like ‘persecution’ and ‘martyrdom’ when referring to individuals’ lives when they’ve been impacted by abusive powers that silenced them. As a preacher’s kid, I’m also aware of religious persecution and martyred saints as comparable examples from Christian religious histories.
There are rich traditions in the U.S. and other countries of protecting religious freedom and I think it may be time to fully claim such protections in the context of a wider range of beliefs that include spiritual beliefs, to be sure, but also health care and economic and political justice views and beliefs.
If, as Gandhi famously said, “There is no God higher than Truth” and truth is defined as “that which exists” or “that which is objectively real” then all of creation is our scripture and the study of all creation is a mode of worship. As conscious observers, we witness what occurs in the world and perhaps even change physical reality in some ways simply by observing it, if the Copenhagen interpretation in Quantum Physics holds true. And, after witnessing, we may feel moved to testify about the truth as we’ve come to understand it…
Please accept this video as my current testimony about the ongoing struggle to reduce suffering in the world by helping spread hidden truths. Joined by Journalist/Documentarian Kate Jaques Prentice, I discuss and reflect on my twenty years of studying controversial political, spiritual and health-related issues and what might be next for "truther" movements:
Let’s posit the existence of a new religious movement based on adopting a fearless and disciplined pursuit of truth in all aspects of life.
Supposedly, we live in a society that eschews discrimination based on race, gender, preference or creed. If what we believe about key issues related to health, spirituality and politics are part of our creed, shouldn't our right to hold these beliefs and not be discriminated against be upheld the same as any other protected group's rights?
Why should there be any difference between beliefs that are acknowledged to be faith-based and beliefs that are, at least in the eyes of adherents, evidence-based? Even if we could rationalize different treatment, who in the world would be qualified to determine what views are faith-based and what views are evidence-based? Is it not true that even evidence-based views have a kind of faith-- faith in an epistemological process that guides the pursuit of truth and the gathering of evidence?
Those of us who have embraced a journey-in-truth as part of our lives have spent years unlearning falsehoods, learning new ideas, speaking truth and seeing how people respond to it. It is time, now, in 2023 and going forward, to live the truths we’ve learned and demonstrate to others who are willing and able to see and hear it, how much better life can be if we apply the knowledge we’ve gained.
It’s time for a deeper dialog about how to disengage from unproductive conversations online and engage in mutual support, in real life, to put new ideas into practice so all of us can benefit from them. So, please watch the video and let me know what you think.
It gets complicated, trying to tell science from religion. You have articulated a case that evidence-based pursuit of truth ought to have all the protections enjoyed by Mormons and orthodox Jews. On the other side, we see that the academic establishment of scientists has taken on the status of a priesthood. When the Church was all-powerful in Europe, rich people found it profitable to buy influence in the Church. Now that Science is the religion of the 21st century, rich corporations have bought ought the medical research community. I grew up with a reductionist-materialist view of the world which, for many years, I believed to be evidence-based. I now see that as "faith-based science", and I've made myself unemployable by pursuing scientific leads that undermine established science. "The truth will set you free" -- John 8:31. "The truth will lead to nothing but trouble." -- Galileo
“There is no God higher than Truth”
Gandhi was wrong. Truth is not a god, and we should not make it one. Just speaking the truth...