Fake news? God also stands on fake news
Since the rise of Donald Trump, there is a picture that the dignified old thing called ‘truth’ is being suppressed, distorted or kicked about, while lies are being packaged and spread with sinister motives.
Things would be more straightforward if every side (on any issue) did not call itself the good guys, and its opponents the bad guys. The good guys supposedly tell the truth; the bad guys supposedly spread lies.
As it is, your very best guy on climate change may be your most annoying bad guy on red meat or Chinese colonialism.
There are therefore billions of good-bad-cum-bad-good guys crisscrossing our planet, their stories fighting for ‘truth’ status.
However, since everybody calls their story the truth and cannot tolerate the other party calling this story a lie, why not accept (with a pinch of salt) that all the stories are ‘true’?
Hence the invention called ‘alternative facts,’ or ‘alternative truths’. It is better to live with all the competing claims declared to be true, than to kill each other over one concrete but elusive truth.
Considering the objections of some language purists, what we often have in fact (?) are competing lies. Alternative lies.
At year end, the greatest traders in lies, politicians, usually go in recess. Their near equals, the religious clerics, come to the fore, with their lies getting really spectacular.
The first biblical report about man and God was the fabrication of Adam and Eve. Man-like and artist-like, the Creator was a super sculptor with the magical power to ‘pump’ life into selected artifacts.
A beautiful legend, yes, but as a record of actual events it was certainly fake news.
We may never ascertain the father of Jesus, but the (literal) virginity of the mother was another case of fake news.
The Crucifixion, yes; but whether Jesus died immediately or in other circumstances many years later, reports of his miraculous resurrection were also fake news.
Today, although a team of quiet godless biotech scientists has a better chance at ‘miracles’ than all the sweat-soaked ‘prophets’ screaming in ‘tongues’ on December 31, God’s miracle men still have a lot of clients in our backward societies.
The puzzling thing is that they cannot learn from secular society and declare their competing gimmicks ‘alternative truths’. Instead, they are eternally screaming at each other: “False prophet …False prophet…”
Which of them is not a false prophet? Which of them is not luring gullible believers to pay heavily – in cash – for partaking in rituals that were always laughable because they are from the witchdoctor’s handbook of the occult and fake magic?
If your Pentecostal sorcerer fixes you instantly with rice, water or coconut oil, another pastor will harass God for exactly six months, until the Almighty reads all the cards on which his clients have listed their desires.
God again has exactly six months to deliver the customised miracles.
If you are homebound, place your hand over the radio loudspeaker during the pastor/sorcerer’s incantations. The power of God will ‘jump’ from the radio and flow through your body. Your Aids will be healed, your US visa issued, and you will build your house in a posh neighbourhood.
The money collected by whatever hook is not for them, the pastors emphasise. It is for your friend, God, whose power drives the miracles.
Don’t laugh. Pay. God is not a crook. It is only amazing His noisiest promoters do not understand that alternative lies about Him have been man’s spiritual diet since the legend of Adam.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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