Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

• John 8:44

Why do you boast of evil, you mighty hero?
    Why do you boast all day long,
    you who are a disgrace in the eyes of God?
You who practice deceit,
    your tongue plots destruction;
    it is like a sharpened razor.
You love evil rather than good,
    falsehood rather than speaking the truth.
You love every harmful word,
    you deceitful tongue!

• Psalm 52:1-4

You boast, “We have entered into a covenant with death, with the realm of the dead we have made an agreement. When an overwhelming scourge sweeps by, it cannot touch us, for we have made a lie our refuge and falsehood our hiding place.”

• Isaiah 28:15

“Thom Adams explains why he posted more than 200 intriguing and false facts on the internet, and how he learned that he too has an idiot brain.”

• Thom Adams, an article for The Spinoff

For a joke, this science teacher, Thom Adams, probably from New Zealand since the Spinoff originates there, posted a tweet that said he would invent a fake fact for each like that he got for the tweet.  When he copied the tweet as an illustration for his article, there were 437 likes and they were still multiplying.  Among the “fake facts” that he invented, he said that England’s largest horticultural export was the fig, thyme was technically a tree, the same molecule that makes chicken taste like chicken can also be found in ground up oyster shells, the toenail of your little toe is called the ‘spungle’, and I think my favorite: The roller coaster was invented during the Hundred Years War as a way of launching supplies across rivers.  He wrote the article to state that his brain was an idiot because he had no idea that people would desire fake facts.

But what is a fake fact?  Is it not a falsehood?!  Why call it a fake fact when it is impossible for it to be a fact when it is false?  I think that is why the Master of Lies, Satan, loves language so much.  He is not confusing the “hell out of us.”  He is confusing “Hell into us.”

If we make every statement said or printed by mankind a “fact.” and we make truth relative to the person, Satan can convince us that God is just an illusion.  And that outcome has sent millions to hell over the years.  The best lie ever told by the Master of Lies is that there is no truth.

But where did I get the idea for this post?  Not Thom Adams’ article.  In reading other people’s posts, I get all these advertisements.  Often I get one that states “Fake Facts that You Thought Were True” or even fake facts that you were taught in school or something like that. 

I rarely blink as I scroll past, but when I got the ad for the 25 historical people that never existed…  Please!  If they are historical, they had to exist!  I looked at the article knowing what I would find, but what else I found was idiotic.  The article stated that Jesus, Moses, and Solomon never existed.  There was no proof to support their claim.  They simply wanted them to not exist.  The shocking claims were things like Mark Twain not ever existing because he was really Samuel Clemens.  Really?  If I write under an assumed name both me and my nom de plume evaporate from existence?!  And what of people like Shakespeare and Ernest Hemingway?  If a so-called Shakespearean expert claims that Shakespeare did not write this sonnet or that play due to a shift in writing style, does that mean that Shakespeare never existed?  If Shakespeare never existed, then there would be no such thing as a Shakespearean expert.  Thus, by the rules of Logic, Shakespeare’s non-existence flips back to existence which puts us in a vicious circle.  Can we leave Shakespeare in the history books and admit that he might have gotten credit for something he did not write?  Come on, we may never know how many of the Margaret Truman novels were ghost written by Donald Bain, who now writes them under his name, but that does not mean Margaret Truman never existed.

I am sure that it is pure idiocy just like the articles about fake facts that are not true.

Yes, Logic, a field within the study of philosophy, is not for everyone.  And as Mark Twain once said, or did not say since some people think he never existed, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”  And by the way, Abraham Lincoln said that.  I lied!!!  But how many people say that Mark Twain said it?  Could they not both have said it?  Their lives overlapped.  But who said it first?

Fake News can be reported by never telling a lie, just telling facts that support one way of thinking and never giving all the truth.  Pravda was reported (or a joke said they reported) to have made a report on a track and field competition where the USSR and the USA were the only two competitors.  They reported that the USSR came in second place and the USA came in next to last.  They had the facts straight, but the impression given was “fake.”

So if Fake News can, in limited cases, be true information, just misleading, then can fake facts exist?

Let us remove that confusion by saying “NO!”

God does not tell falsehood.  And we can rely on Him.  But let’s keep a few words in the language free from misinterpretation.  There is no such thing as a fake fact, but falsehoods abound and seem to multiply.

And for those in the USA:

Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, for those in Canada, I’m about a month late for that bit of well wishing.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.