Black Lies Matter

If there is no truth, then why do you believe the idea that there is no truth is true?

From the poisoned minds and mouths of my students I overhear the post-modern sound bite that beauty is a mirage, nothing but cultural consensus, that all we have are shifting sands and private privileges. A demonic fog machine has polluted the air they breathe and the thoughts they voice. In this foul fog, no one is wrong. (Except those who oppose their beliefs) In the fog, no one is accountable.

I obliterate their ideology with one question.

If there is no truth, then why do you believe the idea that there is no truth is true?

This sentence is a mirror they refuse to look into.

Because even to deny truth, you must smuggle it in through the back door. You must assume the solidity of logic, the reliability of language, the shared structure of meaning. Otherwise, your denial evaporates before it leaves your lips. It’s the Oroborous swallowing its own tail and calling it philosophy.

They reduce beauty to preference, as if a sunset were no more than a vote, as if Mozart was merely a flavor, like choosing vanilla over dog shit. But why then does a Gothic cathedral bring us to our knees? Why does a piece of music composed centuries ago still strike the same hidden chord in strangers who share no culture, no language, no agreement? How can music move us to tears?

Because beauty is not invented, it is recognized. It is discovered the way a planet is discovered. It was always there, waiting for eyes capable of seeing. The more a work of art is aligned with the light and truth of God, expressed harmoniously in a fractal fiction, the more beauty it reveals.

I stood in front of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in Madrid’s Prado so long that the guard had to escort me out of the room. Even so, I could not look for prolonged periods of time. The beauty was almost painful. I felt the kind of guilt you feel when you are caught looking at a very beautiful person in public. I was not worthy.

Post-modernism mistakes the fracture of perception for the absence of reality. It confuses the cracked mirror with the disappearance of the face. Yes, we are flawed observers. Yes, we interpret through the smudged lens of experience. But distortion does not negate the existence of what is being distorted.

I believe any ideology based on lies will eventually fall under its own weight. Communism, Atheism, Wokism, Post-Modernism, Dispensationalism, are all cathedrals built on black lies. I tell white lies on occasion, to protect someone’s feelings or even avoid conflict.

I atone for my sins, white as they may be.

But Black Lies are the devil’s language. They slander God’s truth.

A crooked ruler does not abolish the straight line.

Truth remains. Quiet, indifferent, unbothered by our debates. You can try and blot out Notre Dame with smoke and fire, scrawl graffiti on her sacred walls ranting about how the church is guilty of oppressing marginalized people as a symbol of the patriarchy, but the cathedral does not care. It waits. Immune to your vandalism.

Because when the walls have been cleaned and the smoke clears, there she stands.

Truth.