Well then, what authority can we really rely on?

The written word, the true facts we are given, authoritative pronouncements — our lives are governed by authority, by a promise that what we are being told is the real deal, the whole truth, the gospel for our lives. The problem is we are never given all the facts, we are never allowed to share the process of establishing the authority of written material, and we are certainly not educated enough to begin to fully, completely, assess the veracity of someone’s pronouncements.Books are usually assumed to be the most authoritative form of truth. If the word is written, it is indelible and, supposedly, factual. Why? Because since man first started writing, setting thoughts and facts in stone (literally) and then clay (cuneiform), the notion you would have to abide forever with a lie — well that was just too horrible to live with. Out here in the desert southwest, rocks are chisel marked with shapes, forms, counting symbols — permanent shapes that mean something — possibly figurative not literal — to a people long past. Well, perhaps not so long past... “Joe loves Sally, 1952” is a pretty clear statement. But does Joe really love Sally still? What may once have been a fact may now be fiction.The myth of truth started out with the early writers that continues to this day. If they set it in stone, clay, papyrus, paper and now pixels on a screen — surely they know they are writing indelibly and will be saying something of import and true. This myth is so persistent, so relied upon as a mark of purity, that whole sections of the Old and New Testament, as well as the Koran, Torah, Hindu scripture, Buddhist writings, and on and on — all these have sections that can, and have, been successively re-written by the hand of man through the ages. It is why the story of Moses and the tablets was so compelling — here was the only written, in stone, words of God not written by man. Since the tablets are lost to time, the words have, of course, been rewritten, translated, adulterated by man ever since, but they still part of the myth that what is down on stone or paper is true.True is a fudgy word. Like a stopped watch, true can be perfectly accurate twice a day. Or like an atomic clock, true can be perfectly accurate once in a billion years. The former is hard to assess, the latter close enough to allow you to form an opinion of what is exactly true for you. But in the end, fact and truth are in the mind of the reader, the beholder, simply because you have to make an evaluation in order to understand the relevance to you. If you read, you take in light photons bounced off the page, that then dance on your retina. This causes the nerves in your retina to send signals to your brain which processes the signals, searching for patterns in memory that match the sequence of nerve impulses, allowing the cognitive section of your brain to “recognize” what you are looking at. That is what reading is. It is a process of recognition, memory and desire to recognize. In the desire part comes personal need and reflection. The written word may not, then, be pure, you may be adulterating it every time you read.And if the written word in a book may not be pure, it may be open to different interpretation by two different people with different experience, different memory and different evaluation processes. And in the Internet age where the fallacy of the perfect truth coming from any writer is self-evident (I hope), the myth of the writer is diminishing. So who can we believe?In fact, since that first rock carving, man has always had a version of the truth relevant to them, a cause or a belief. Man lies. None of anything written can be believed as perfect if only because man has written it, in one form or another. The reader is required to interpret what the reader sees, reads, and understands. The Bible is this way; why else would we need bible study? Same with the Torah and the Koran and the writings of Confucius or Taoism. Man must not believe the myth of infallibility of the writer, man must learn, evaluate, assess and come to a personal understanding, especially in this the over-whelming text age of the Internet.Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.