Can You Tell the Truth from All the Surrounding Misinformation?

Editorial Commentary (1 Cor 5:1-13)

Khen Lim



Actual snow in Sapa, Vietnam in 2013
Image source: says.com

Recently, news on the Internet have been abuzz with reports that some parts of Malaysia could be in for a nice and snappy cold weather change. As low as 16^o Celsius was touted. Apparently the Meteorological Department (MET Malaysia) predicted that as near to Ipoh as the suburb of Subang Jaya in Petaling Jaya was a likely recipient, making it not much different from the higher-altitude Cameron Highlands.

To make things more exciting, MET director-general Datuk Che Gayah cited Kuala Krai in Kelantan as having experienced such low temperature last year. And considering that Vietnam had just experienced snow and Bangkok was hit with a similar 16^o Celsius change, locals were apparently bracing for an exciting time.

That was in late January, which was before the Chinese New Year season arrived. We are now fourteen days into the month of February of 2016 and the ‘closest’ we got to were patches of scattered showers but nothing approaching the cool torrentials. There were no signs of baseball-sized hail. No snow blitzes unlike Sapa in Vietnam in 2015 that was hit with a temperature of -1^o Celsius.

All we had was just plain old rain. Chinese New Year 2016 came and went without nary a splutter. No episode of cold weather was even within sight. Instead the customary sweltering Chinese New Year heat was what we got and all the brouhaha amounted to yet another misinformation. I can just imagine how some people would have felt anticlimactic or crestfallen.

Spurious weather reports (for Malaysia at least) are just one of countless examples of how information cannot always be relied upon. And if you want to be reminded of the most recent infamous example of misinformation, look no further than the Y2K issue that almost caused a global meltdown; perhaps as near to a pandemonium as the whole world got to.

For Malaysians, let’s not forget that every end of the year for the past decade or more, we’ve all been hearing about how the next year was always going to be an en-masse economic disaster. Doom was unfailingly nigh. And every time, that disaster never exactly came. While GST and the poor Ringgit performance weren’t exactly great news over here, they didn’t really constitute an all-out economic disaster that doomsayers had been touting. And right now, we’re again told that 2016 will be that disastrous year. We’ll just have to see.

In fact, every day, we face a constant deluge of information of which we’d be incredibly thankful if we can trust even one percent of what we read and hear. And it’s not just local news. What we read about in America and Europe are just as unreliable.

American media likes to tell us that they’re climbing out of their massive unemployment problem but the real news that we don’t often see tells us otherwise. While Germany blames the recent rape crisis that was sparked across different cities on their own local German citizens, many of us are wondering how misinformed the government and media can be when everyone else seems to know that certain sections of the Syrian refugees need to be questioned.

Trying to disentangle ourselves from the unreliable information everywhere is like figuring out how we can rid ourselves of the yeast (leaven) in our lives (1 Cor 5:1-13). Try as we might, the answer is no unless we excommunicate ourselves from society, go live in the most remote parts of the world and shun ourselves from social contact and the rest of civilisation.

So long as we live within the structures of society, we will continue to be fed all sorts of information that we are persistently told we can trust be it socio-economic, political or news about the environment. There has been so many lies that, at best, it’s too difficult to know what aren’t anymore. And the more we look around us, the bleaker the picture is in terms of what we can rely on.

Jesus called the Pharisees ‘yeast’ because they covet their Old Testament knowledge even to the most exacting point and yet they were too blind to see beyond their noses at the big picture, the truth of God, the coming of the Messiah. In fact, throughout the Old Testament, there are many passages that talk about the coming of Christ and yet the Pharisees still could not recognise Him in their face-to-face encounters. With the Truth staring in front of them, they actually decided to send Him to His death.

And so we keep trying and trying to figure out if the news we get is reliable or not but in our abject helplessness, we confess to know that the only one reliable piece of truth is Christ and Christ alone.

You and I know that truth. We learn about that truth. We live that truth.   

Have a great week.