What does anything mean?

For the Christian, words matter.  God spoke and all things came to be -- the Word is creative.  Christ is that Word through which anything that exists was called into being.  Christ is the Word made flesh in a moment in time.  He speaks through the voice of His Word.  The Bible is the written Word of God.  It does not take much to get it.  Words matter because God works through His Word.  Without that Word, faith is not possible since faith comes by hearing the Word of God.  The Spirit works through means -- the means of the Word, Scripture.  I could go on but it is pretty basic stuff.  So when we confront a world in which words do not matter, when truth is subjective, and when nothing is more than one person wide or deep and even then subject more to feeling or experience over truth, we are bound to have problems.

How we judge truth and how we see words is affected not simply by the Scriptures or religion but by the world in which we live.  You do not have to be a conservative to note how we treat words.  From the newspeak in which words take on a different meaning and context than they originally and universally meant to the doublespeak in which words are intentionally freighted with a different meaning than they would literally convey, we find ourselves at a great disadvantage politically, socially, morally, and religiously.  Yes, the Church is sometimes to blame for this confusion but even more has been the incorporation of the way the world around us communicates into the framework of religion and faith.

Add to this is the way those who control the message have the ability to change the historical record. To the victor belong the spoils and so important to that is the ability to write the history in such way that it favors them.  We have all known this but there have always been those whose recollection has challenged a false historical narrative.  The difference is that some have invented history and written it back into the past as if it really did take place.  The invention of history is not simply the altered facts but the slant on those facts.  For example, CBS recorded the announcement that Candidate Harris wanted to remove the tax on tips with glee and to the accolades of those in the hospitality industry.  However, a few months ago the same media was suspect of the cost to the treasury when Candidate Trump said he would do the same.  So we alter things by the spin we place on them as much as by the change of the actual record or fact itself.  The isolated incidence of same sex relationships in ancient cultures has become normative and justification for the radical shift that such same sex marriage was and is for our time.  All of this rewrites history or changes the slant on it to favor a presupposition instead of merely reporting the fact.

The unknown today is the new reality of artificial intelligence and what it could do to the established historical record and to the slant placed upon that history by those looking back.  What could AI do in service to those who wish to cleanse the past from the things that the present deems as its sins or alter our perception of that record?  I do not have a clue how this might further erode any idea of or appreciate for the constant of fact and truth.

Back where I began, let us think for a moment on how this suspicion of history or denial of the objectivity of truth bears on those who hear God's Word.  The Spirit is not simply working against the heart hardened by sin to disbelieve God over preference and experience and reason but is battling the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth or that if there is that objective truth does not matter.  For this reason we speak the Gospel not simply to an unbelieving world but to a world that does not believe in truth any longer.  So how do you think that affects the people who hear Jesus say "I am the way, the truth, and the life?"