“The Good News is not Fake News!”
There’s a great deal of buzz these days over the issue of fake news. Normally fake news is fairly easy to spot if one does some due diligence.
Recently a podcaster I often listen to suggested that one can make a number of easy checks to determine how much trust you may put in any news article. For example:
1) Is there a named contributor or author; 2) Is there a date when the article was published; 3) Are there credible references noted in whatever claims the author makes; and, 4) Who published the news and does the publisher have an editorial board to check the facts?
Unfortunately I’m not sure many of us would apply even these simple tests in determining if a news article is legitimate. I would hope most of us would.
Additionally not all news articles are meant to be fake news in spite of their inaccuracy. A recent news article posted on my Facebook (red flag) page claiming that medical boards in all 50 States have revoked the medical license of Dr. Ben Carson. The article was reported by the left leaning Huffington Post.
Although a simple fact check revealed that Carson had not had his license revoked but that the article was meant as satire. It claimed that Dr. Carson could no longer operate on brains because of some of the brainless comments he had recently made. Unfortunately many people took that article as reliable news and even reposted it.
This was unfair to Dr. Carson but now you see what kind of mess we’ve gotten ourselves into with the use of the social media as our source for news. We all can be news reporters on Facebook or Twitter without being held accountable. This should serve as a warning to us when we pass along or repost any news on our social media outlets.
The use of Facebook alone to post what many perceive as good solid researched news items has created a spirit of cynicism and skepticism over the credibility of all news in general. At the very least it has made it difficult to navigate through all the fake news one is exposed to each day.
Who can we trust? What reported news items can we actually rely upon to be safe and credible? Are all the news outlets fake? Is one outlet more credible than the other. Is CNN or MSNBC more credible than FOX News or vice versa.
Mark begins his Gospel by having Jesus report: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Okay, this I can assure you: The Good News is not fake news, although I sometimes wonder how anyone can believe fake news and disbelieve the Good News.
The Good News, otherwise known as the Gospel, is the best news the world has at the present time. It is reliable and sustainable. It has been around for over two thousand years. There have been some really smart people, such as the neo atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, who have attempted to discredit the Good News as something akin to fake news.
Dawkins’ title of his popular book says it all: The God Delusion. There can be no Good News since God is simply a delusional idea created by humans. Appealing as this may be to many it does not diminish the credibility of Jesus’ original news report:
God’s kingdom has arrived already.
Heaven has come to us!
In the words of Marianne Borg who explains what is meant by the Kingdom of God on earth:
"It is here, now. Which is what the world would be like of God was king and Caesar was not. The vision of Christianity for a just, sane, nonviolent world is not utopian. It is within our capacity.”
This is Good News!
We are living in a very complex and dangerous time in the history of the world. I am not ready to say it is the worst of times, but it is a time in which we definitely need Good News such as this. The Good News is that God loves each one of us beyond anything we could ever imagine, with no strings attached. The Good News is that grace is the operating principle of God's kingdom.
The Good News is not something that needs to be fact checked, but merely trusted to be true.
It is not fake news.
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