Day 18 of 1000
I downloaded a talk by Os Guinness to my Zen Stone Plus MP3 player from the Veritas website. I listened to it during my walk last night. He told a story about Guinness Beer at the beginning of his talk. I looked him up later and found out he is the great-great-great-grandson of the guy that started the Guinness brewing company in Dublin, Ireland. He said some stuff that I thought was very good and that I needed to hear. The main thing he talked about was truth. He drew a sharp contrast between those who believe in absolute truth and those who believe truth is relative.
One particular point, struck me as something I want to do not only because it will help me in my own life, but because it is the right thing to do. He said that some people shape truth to fit their desires. He referred to Paul Johnson’s The Intellectuals, a book that describes the miserable and morally bankrupt lives of people such as Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Rousseau, and others who devoted their lives to the shaping of “truth” to conform to their desires. I read that book about fifteen years and was so impressed with it that I had both Kelly and Christian as part of their homeschool.
The idea that truth is malleable is the defacto position of the bulk of society and is actively and aggressively taught in the bulk of the government schools in the country. Guinness did a great job in establishing that a life lived with such a worldview leads to misery and pain. Johnson did it in more exhaustively in his book. Os Guinness recommends that absolute truth demands that people shape their desires to fit the truth. He was quite convincing that people who live that way lead better and happier lives. He said life dedicated to truth can be much more difficult in the short term, but pays off even in this life, but especially in eternity.
Note: I am really, really glad I went for a walk and did not listen to the Obama speech last night. It appears to have been another non-proposal with nothing written down. Half of a trillion dollars in new spending with a promise that it would be paid for with tax increases. Lots of spoken, not written down specifics about how to spend the money and only a promise for specifics on how it would be paid at a later date.