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The Relationship Between Time and Truth

Time holds the key to truth

By Dean GeePublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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The Relationship Between Time and Truth
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Why is it that time reveals the truth, why the lag? Time and truth seem to have a relationship, the one allows the other to manifest, and it is the interval between the two where we need to tread cautiously.

It can take days, weeks, months, or years, but everyone sees the truth at some point if they are open to it. Many times throughout history, people believed a lie, only for them to realise later, what they thought was true, was in fact a lie.

Some people still rather cling to the lie, because they would rather believe a comfortable lie than face the uncomfortable truth. Many have invested and built their persona and their worldview around their perception of what they believe to be true and it is very difficult for them to back down and admit they were wrong.

Think of those who have built a business, or an industry based on lies. Their livelihood is at stake, so they have a vested interest to continue to live in what is a lie. The tobacco industry comes to mind. In the 1960s and 1970s, compromising doctors supported the tobacco industry. This seems unbelievable given what we now know about the cigarette industry, and how bad they are for our health.

The higher the stakes, the more they will cling to what is clearly being revealed to be false.

We have the scientific literature littered with past hoaxes and fabrications. One, in particular, I find rather amusing and scary all at the same time is a paper that was submitted to a journal called ‘Social Text’. We know it as ‘The Sokal Hoax.’

It is amusing because it was so well written, and scary because people would actually accept nonsense because it was a ‘scientific paper.’

Sokal based his ‘scientific paper’ based on the premise that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct, and that we needed a whole new form of mathematics to understand it.

The paper was a complete spoof, and the scientist named Sokal admitted it was just a joke. If these were faculties in a University, I could see the scientific faculty laughing and ‘high-fiving’ each other as the arts faculty lapped up their nonsense.

The Piltdown Man Hoax is well-known. Many children from the early 1900s grew up learning about human evolution, and the ‘supposed missing link’ in human evolution. They discovered the hoax to be a jaw of an orangutan with a human cranium. They only discovered the fossil to be a hoax 40 years later.

I believe that truth is unchanging, and it exists as a straight line that passes from before time and into eternity. I think that deception snakes in and out of the truth. Deception is greatest when they base it on aspects of truth. When people gain false knowledge, those convinced of its veracity will often cling to that false knowledge, as their lives depend on it.

The ego is something that the most insecure of us protects at all costs, and I have done exactly this too, at various times in my life. I think we all have.

Years later, when I relaxed my dogmatism, I was able to grow and truly learn something, including something about myself.

Truth and the revelation of truth proceed forth unhindered and we discover it when we truly step outside of our ego and humble ourselves. The reality is that we don’t know it all, and the reality is that there are many aspects of life about which we don’t know the truth or fully understand.

‘Trust the science’ they exclaim in the media, and the same is chorused by many world leaders. But when we look back at science and the search for knowledge, we would be wise to question science. We should remain skeptical until the evidence convinces us of the truth.

Living in the information age where the information overwhelms us continually, we have become a generation that does not make judgments after deep study, meditation, or pondering any subject. Life is too fast, so we gather headlines and go with those.

A friend of mine remarked a few years back, that if knowledge were deep pools scattered all over the landscape, the average person, runs past running their fingers over the surface, and then they claim to understand the deep pool of knowledge that their fingers merely disturbed the surface of.

Limited study and cursory or surface knowledge of anything leads invariably to false assumptions and faulty understanding.

Time is the great revealer. We need to spend time to understand the topic and in time we will discover the truth. Don’t let them fool you with headlines or ‘cherry-picked’ scientific data. Go to the source and search for the evidence, and think clearly about the method and how they derived the conclusions. This level of thinking opens up a whole new world and may even lead to innovation.

“Thalidomide was a widely used drug in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the treatment of nausea in pregnant women. It became apparent in the 1960s that thalidomide treatment resulted in severe birth defects in thousands of children.”

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21507989/

The above example shows the lag in time between the effects and the truth. It took around 10 years.

What about today? If today’s ‘science’ is tomorrow’s mythology, does it not warn us to be cautious, the funders of scientific papers have swayed the outcomes of those scientific papers, frequently. Be cautious and be vigilant. When we think about things that are life-changing or potentially life-changing, we would be wise to gather more facts before deciding, when we have the luxury of time at our disposal.

Time reveals the truth. Beware the interval period between the two.

Source: Piltdown man and Sokal Hoax. ..https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15012-eleven-of-the-greatest-scientific-hoaxes/

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About the Creator

Dean Gee

Inquisitive Questioner, Creative Ideas person. Marketing Director. I love to write about life and nutrition, and navigating the corporate world.

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