There is no column today. The newspaper for which I write these columns is taking a statutory holiday.

            But I do have some thoughts, connected to the Christmas event, whether or not it happened on December 25.

            Metaphorically, it reminds us that something new is always being born. Granted, not every human birth is greeted with joy. In one of his more elegiac songs, Elvis Presley sang,

“On a cold and gray Chicago mornin'

A poor little baby child is born

In the ghetto

And his mama cries…”

            But every birth is another chance, another attempt, to get it right. Surely that’s the underlying message of Mary’s Magnificat – this time, THIS time, we’ll get it right!

            Last autumn, I bought a copy of John Cobb’s book, “Jesus’ Abba.” Cobb argues (as do I, sometimes) that over the centuries the institutional church has smothered the close relationship Jesus obviously had with his Abba by turning a loving Daddy into a distant and autocratic God-The-Father-Almighty.

            But it was Cobb’s subtitle that caught me: “The God who has not failed.”

            I heard myself asking, why can’t God fail? Or, perhaps more precisely, why are we not willing to let God fail?

            There are, according to UNICEF estimates, 353,000 births every day – yes, every day! – around the world. If we assume that God, however we define God, is involved in each of those births, might we not safely assume that at least a few of them will prove to be failures?

            Some will grow up to be drug dealers. Some will commit rape and/or murder. Some will defraud elderly widows. Some will wage unnecessary wars. Some will grab power and abuse it.

            And some, tragically, won’t grow up at all.

            Maybe in each of those, God fails.

            God sets the ball in motion, but it rolls into the gutter.

            But God – whatever that is – doesn’t quit trying. So a few of those 353,000 births will grow up to reveal in their lives what Paul called the proof of the presence of God’s spirit: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

            They will make this world a better place. As the song says, “You in your small corner, and I in mine.”

            That’s the possibility we celebrate at Christmas.

            And that’s why I put a string of exclamation marks after my greeting this morning.

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Copyright © 2016 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.

            To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca

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Even though there’s no column this week, last week’s column about living in a post-fact world produced lots of letters.

            Some focused on the U.S. political situation specifically.

            So Larry Smith wrote, “My observation about the U.S. is that they have become absolutely polarized, certainly in their politics, but also in almost everything else. There are no grey areas or even room for discussion. Very sad.”

And Tom Watson commented, “Misinformation, disinformation, fake news and outright lies helped elect Donald Trump. Why did Trump's lies not seem to matter? One analysis I saw was that ‘Trump's supporters took him seriously but not literally; Trump's opponents took him literally but not seriously.’

            “It's always been the case that the more often something is repeated, the more apt it is to be believed, but it seems we have now regressed as a society to the place where fake news is taken to be as valid as the most carefully sourced journalism. When the purveyors of fake news are challenged, they stick to their post-fact mentality and argue, ‘Well, it's true because you haven't proved it's not true.’

            “However, we have to believe that in the end truth will win the day. Otherwise, losing the capacity to discern, and no longer caring to bother checking, bodes exceedingly poorly for our social system.”

Ted Wilson asked, “Isn’t that what Paul Simon was saying in his song?

I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest…”

Laurna Tallman thought I should look at “the educational disparities in the U.S. and how they impinge on some of the topics you have raised recently.

            “The divide between ‘South’ and ‘North’ is a divide in educational principles, of which Southern beliefs in the theory of evolution are one of the most obvious. Militarism, reflected in the beliefs in the value of military training for young men is another. As a curriculum consultant who lived for a few years in that part of the U.S., working on projects in Appalachian Kentucky and the Arkansas Ozarks, I saw a peculiar blend of modern subjects, folklore beliefs, and religious prejudices perpetuated in the schools as a reflection of community values.

            “The divide between rural and urban education was strongly demonstrated in the voting in ‘swing states’ in the recent election. The less well-educated folk in rural areas were more easily duped by ‘post-fact’ rhetoric and shallow appeals to emotion. The urban vote was dominated by voters with post-secondary school educations.”

Other writers focused on the value of facts, whatever they are.

Isabel Gibson, who works with facts every day: “I understand the frustration of people trying to fact-check inflammatory claims. It's slow work, proving a negative, and the hits just keep on coming.  It can feel like shovelling water with a fork.

            “I want to believe that the effort itself is valuable, even if the results aren't quick or even evident.

            “Let me add another rule of thumb to your list: If the claim supports your own opinion, be especially careful. It' so easy to bristle at silliness that supports what I consider an obnoxious world view, but a little harder to even notice [flaws in] claims that align with what I believe to be true.”

Speaking of checking facts, Randy Murray suggested I recheck the value of Pi. I had cited it as 3.14162. It is, in fact, 3.141592 – a tiny difference, but still significant.

Peter Clark wondered “why commentators are so reticent to call this phenomenon by its name; it's called lying!  With so much at stake why have we not been calling this out from the roof-tops? I say ‘we’ because I live on the UK, and we experienced the same lying from both sides of the debate before the Brexit referendum -- but, if it's possible to measure this, not nearly to the level to which The Donald sinks.”

Robert Caughell remembered the novel 1984: “Orwell had the ‘Ministry of Truth’ that decided what was ‘true’ or not… Have we gotten to the point where verifiable truth/facts no longer matter?”

Steve Roney saw the loss of facts as having a long history: “Where did all this come from? Certainly, it was not Trump’s innovation. It has been the core teaching of the New Left for the past sixty or more years. It is from Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Marcuse's ideal society was, wrote Kołakowski, “to be ruled despotically by an enlightened group [who] have realized in themselves the unity of Logos and Eros, and thrown off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences.” Marcuse, in turn, was heavily influenced by Heidegger, who was influenced by Nietzsche.

            “Having pushed this idea for a good 50 or 60 years, it is funny to hear some on the Left now complain that Donald Trump is supposedly embracing it…

            “Perhaps it is not hypocrisy. If you follow the wonderland logic of postmodernism and the New Left, that truth is whatever I want it to be, then I guess it follows that anyone who disagrees with me is either lying or simply denying reality.”

Terry Carscadden pointed out that facts themselves can be misleading; manipulation of statistics can introduce distorted “truths”:

            “When helmets were introduced in the 1st World War, they noted that more soldiers were being killed with helmets than those without helmets, so they took them off -- until a thoughtful soldier realized that the reason was that those WITH helmets were sent to the front lines!

            “I could study 1000 male golfers, 500 of whom wear shorts and the other 500 wear long pants. Those who wear shorts will have scores several strokes less than those who wear pants. The ‘truth’ is obvious.

            “I loved statistics; it was the only university course that I got 100 in!”

Peter Scott summarized the issue: “I'm not sure that facts or truth or reality matter much anymore, except in an abstract sense and perhaps in one-to one relationships.  The most important fact/truth/reality today (in my opinion) is that there are billions too many humans alive on the planet.  Most of the problems facing the world are either caused by or exacerbated by this plague of people.  Climate change, pollution, garbage, extinction of species all become impossible problems to solve as long as we humans continue to reproduce at current rates and keep people alive until well past their best-before date.

            “We live in a world of denial.  We call death ‘passing on’.  No-one is dead.  They have ‘passed’ or some other religious euphemism.  The one reality that faces all life is death but if we refuse to even name it in our conversation then we are living in a post-reality world as well.”

And although my column about opioid drugs was three weeks ago, I want to end with this letter from a woman who gave her name only as “Helen”:

            “I read your article today. Finally I hear some thoughtful rational thinking. I whole-heartedly agree with the decriminalization of drugs, heroin in particular.

            "I lost my son in January to fentanyl. Last year at this time, if I could have figured out a way to provide my son with a maintenance dose of heroin, I would have, and he would still be here.

            “I have been advocating for change since my oldest boy died [also of overdose] in 2011. I advocate with a group of western Canadian moms that have all lost children to drug misuse. Our advocacy work is not for our kids; they are gone. Our work is for the others out there suffering and dying.

            “Safe Injection Sites just make good sense, both on a human level and economic level. Keep writing about this. We will see hundreds more die before we agree on a solution.”

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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            Ralph’s HymnSight webpage is still up, http://www.hymnsight.ca, with a vast gallery of photos you can use to enhance the appearance of the visual images you project for liturgical use (prayers, responses, hymn verses, etc.)

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