We are plagued by a world that will accept the first thing that’s shown and will fight to the death for those, “facts,” because it can’t stand to be wrong. Much of what I’ve seen in the last few days, in news or religious content, makes a lot of assumptions and only goes to the surface of the information available.
On the news side, The Daily Wire recently had layoffs and Candace Owens said that it was 60% of employees at The Daily Wire. Love them or hate them, a claim like that has significant weight behind it because that’s a large number of individuals that would have had their lives flipped over. Some people might take that 60% as fact and call it a day, hating The Daily Wire for more than hurting their feelings. Jeremy Boreing, the ex-CEO of The Daily Wire, talks about this and how outrageous a claim like that is without any backing. https://x.com/JeremyDBoreing/status/2051803341873619353
The flip side is a little more personal. I’m an ex-Mormon but still like to try to keep every pool of knowledge that I have filled so I can have discussions with my family or others that are still Mormon. My goodness is that a task. Regardless, I listened to a LDS podcast where the two men were discussing a Matt Fradd article, ironically from The Daily Wire where he is now employed, titled, “7 Reasons Joseph Smith Was A False Prophet.” All of these gentlemen’s rebuttals were surface level. “Do you think a young Joseph Smith could dictate 10’s of thousands of words daily without the help of God?” and, “How could a man with a 3rd grade education translate a book?” If you look at the context of the times, people were great story tellers. Hiding in a hat and talking probably wasn’t that hard. Additionally, do you know who else had no education and started a religion? Muhammad. I’m not here to bash on LDSism or Islam. I’m just trying to visualize that things aren’t always as they seem. A 3rd grade education doesn’t discredit other qualities that an individual can have. Here’s the podcast I’ve referenced. I’m paraphrasing the quotes as well, they are not directly pulled form the video. https://youtu.be/TejAyiKYnzM
To tie it all together, we look to Epictetus, “First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.” Our media will shove anything our way and hope that we bit at the first thing. This is driving hatred and misinformation at a global scale. We all need to step back, and peel of the surface level answers that we know by heart to get to the root of the information.
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