Why is the Truth nowhere to be found ?
It seems so hard to get to what is real in our world today. There are so many sources of information and we are never sure what the hidden agenda is or might be of the particular site we are on.
How can we get to the real bedrock of truth and avoid lies and mis-truths?
How can we decide who to believe?
Well, first we look to people and organizations who already have a good reputation, a reputation of some degree of objectivity. That is pretty hard to find. We judge often by how much we feel the person agrees with us.
So we must ask ourselves first if we are prejudiced. But none of us wants to admit the possibility that "we" are prejudiced.
In the end it depends a lot on how opinionated we are or on what particular ax we have to grind. And we have to admit Everyone has an ax to grind and no one is without prejudice. There is no such thing as total objectivity. We are all just humans who do not possess omnipotence.
If you tend to be more conservative, you trust other conservatives more. If you are more liberal, you tend to trust the folks who describe themselves as liberal. But in the final analysis, you can find truth on both sides of the political
spectrum.
My personal opinion is that God is the only source of ultimate truth and all of us see the little piece that is closest to us. For non-believers in a deity, my atheist brothers and sisters, some of you also see great truths about our human situation. But I would probably have many differences in how each of us see life here on this third rock from the Sun.
All that being said, each person must arrive at some sort of equation or procedure to use to determine who is lying or has questionable motives.
People talk about due diligence, but even accessing a broad range of information often leaves us puzzled.
In addition, we have to admit to several wild cards. For one thing, the internet is full of websites which are anonymous, un-ascribed, and undated, with no easy way to 'vett' the source. Actually like a site like this one.
You have no way of really knowing who I am. I could be a Russian hacker or an agent of a foreign land. I have tried to describe where I am coming from and to be open about my own motives, but you will have to be the judge of that.
But we all should acknowledge for every person trying to express their particular version of the 'Truth", there are 10 or 100 who are not really trying to be honest. Also, there are active dis-information websites run by foreign powers like Russia and others. They take a seed of truth and then wrap it up in their particular propaganda to spin the info to serve themselves.
Then there are unscrupulous website owners who really do not care what the truth is. They are the "Click-baiting" sites. They take whatever headline is trending, and then they sensationalize it to get your attention, (because we are all attracted to the most outrageous news), and they make their money with ads and other selling, because they have traffic to their site.
Even if you do a diligent search for more information to substantiate what you just read or seen, you will encounter tons of conflicting data. So in the end, you are thrown back onto your own resources and your own best guesstimate.
Welcome to the world we humans in all our infinite wisdom have created.
My best suggestion is to read everything you can, survey and surf widely, and after you have gathered a fair amount of data, from a broad variety of sources, then make up your own mind. I guess that is the way it has always been. It helps if you have a foundation of truth to stand on. You have to start somewhere. Most of us find the baseline of truth in religion, but you may also find value in scientific and empirical data. I wish you all luck and hope that what you decide on contains some compassion for us humans and for all life on the planet.
