In the early 1980s, I had an ugly run-in with truth, thanks to a boyfriend who was completely unfamiliar with the concept. Here's how that experience impacted my quest for the ultimate, absolute truths that govern our existence.

I spent the next two decades operating with a truth detector that worked only intermittently, when I really wanted it to. Which means I spent a fair share of my life being dead wrong.

The 1995 O. J. Simpson case was a good example. My interest in pro football was skyrocketing that year, as the Packers climbed into the ranks of the elite teams, and O. J. was a true NFL hero. I didn’t want him to be guilty of murdering his ex-wife. So I eagerly embraced the contention that, unlike the bloodbath at the crime scene itself, there were only a few drops of blood in his Bronco. I agreed that those drops had undoubtedly been planted, perhaps by a corrupt or jealous policeman.

I clung to these notions, using them to screen the rest of the evidence. When it came time to look at the big picture, I donned my Agatha Christie lenses, absolutely certain that the solution could not be as obvious as it looked. I reasoned that no one could have been as stupid as O. J. would’ve had to have been to commit this terrible crime. I concluded that there was another killer on the loose – perhaps his son – and that O. J. had either been expertly framed or was sacrificing himself for his kid. I made no secret of my relief when the not-guilty verdict was delivered.

In February of 2000, lying on a beach in Jamaica with my anti-O. J. golfing girlfriends, oblivious to the cancer growing in my mother’s belly, I read lead prosecutor Marcia Clark’s book Without a Doubt. And discovered that I had done quite a remarkable job of closing my eyes to an entire evidence-room full of indisputable facts.

When I sheepishly admitted my error to my girlfriends, they crowed.

“Ha!” said the one I knew best. “I told you so! I TOLD you! Next time, maybe you’ll listen to me!”

It was then that I decided never again to let my emotions and biases distort objective truth. It was a major departure for someone who had always been ruled by her feelings; Marcia Clark had done what multiple leakers and liars had failed to do.

                                                                                  
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Perhaps not so coincidentally, my resolve to search out the unvarnished truth would be tested just a few months later, as I began investigating my mother’s faith.

Once again, I was being forced to consider the possibility that something I had long refused to believe might actually be true.

In the very early going, I kept stumbling over my virtual certainty that my mother’s religion was ugly and prudish and intolerant; that it was arrogant beyond belief with its claims of absolute and exclusive truth; and that it starred a Creator who, if He existed, took great pleasure in giving His creatures good things like food and drink and money and sex and then telling them “Hands off!”

These were among the reasons I had developed my own little theological system over the decades – one that could be adjusted whenever necessary to accommodate some fun idea put forth in a conversation or book or even a movie like the too-cool afterlife fantasy “What Dreams May Come,” with its resident-run, “they all lived happily ever after” portrayal of heaven.

Even though I was sort of leaning towards the existence of a God by the mid-1990s, my personal theology certainly didn’t depend on such a being. Mine was a passive-tense theology: We were put here to reach our full potential as human beings.  We would be judged based on our characters and good deeds. Those who were allowed into heaven (if it existed) would include just about everyone except Adolf Hitler and Christian fundamentalists.

If I didn’t want to address the issue of who, if anyone, would do the putting, judging and allowing, well, that was my business; it was my afterlife scenario, after all. And it was just as valid as anyone else’s, because no one could possibly know for sure what happens to us after we die. No one.
 
                                                                                 
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During that tumultuous decade, I even toyed occasionally with the flip side of the “can’t know” coin – the idea that absolute truth doesn’t even exist, no matter what the ancient Greeks may have thought.

But then in early 2001 I read an interesting refutation of that idea. It went something like this:

To say that absolute truth doesn’t exist is to make a statement of absolute truth.
If it’s true, it’s false.

And so it breaks the law of non-contradiction.

I thought about that long and hard and could find no way around it. Absolute truth was apparently alive and well in our 21st century world and apparently always would be.

It was a very reassuring conclusion.

--Heaven Without Her, pages 93-95

I first blogged on this topic back in 2014. Until last night, I hadn't heard anyone in the mainstream media address even its purely secular aspects. Allow me to toss it out there again in the hope that some investigative journalist with both curiosity and influence will pick up on it.

Am I crazy? Or is just about everyone ignoring the most obvious potential cause of mass murder in this country?

The “experts” are focusing on suspects from violent video games to the NRA, from bad nutrition to “systemic” failure, whatever that means. 

“Clearly,” they say, “these young men were very troubled. Why were they not [check one] locked up/denied access to weapons/kept away from rap music?  They were all recognized as mentally ill, and almost all were on, or had been on, psychiatric medications. What went wrong?”

There’s an elephant in this room, one that’s so obvious that it cannot be a simple oversight.

Read the above clause again: “almost all were on, or had been on, psychiatric medications.”

Hello? Investigative reporters? See the common thread here?

Good grief! Are pharmaceutical companies such important advertisers that you can’t possibly name their products as suspects?

The FDA certainly recognizes their dangers. Just about every psych drug’s advertisements include warnings along the lines of, “if you feel like offing yourself while taking this drug, please do let your doctor know.”

The potentially explosive nature of these pharmaceuticals is in fact well known. That includes the increased suicide risk associated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRRIs) like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil -- the most common class of antidepressants.

(Note to investigative reporters: Almost all of these murderers conclude their rampages by committing suicide. See a pattern here? Notice any connection?)

What's more, we mustn't be comforted by the assertion that “so-and-so had stopped taking his meds.” He may well have done so, but reports like this one point out that stopping SRRIs can increase the risk of suicide in children and young adults. Other reports document a slew of other nasty side effects, including anxiety, agitation, extreme restlessness, depression, mood swings, irritability and aggression.

Hello? Sound like feelings that a mass murderer might experience?

Why is no one talking about this? 

Perhaps it would be helpful to consider what American society did about such problems in the days before psychiatry – days when, not so incidentally, mass murder and crippling depression were largely unknown.

Just think about a few of the possibilities.

• Except for the privileged, people worked long, hard days and came home to clean up, do their chores, eat, and sleep. Yes, even children, until the government stepped in with child labor laws to “protect” them.

• Except for the most well (sic) educated, most people believed in God. Their kids learned about the Bible not only in church but in the classroom. They learned that it was wrong to engage in things like ingratitude, sex outside of marriage and coveting others’ goods. They were told that these sins were punishable in this life and, without Christ, in the next. These truths were common knowledge until the government stepped in to “protect” schoolchildren from the Bible.

• Except for the hardest hearted, most people understood that they were not personally the center of the universe, and that they should put others ahead of themselves. This kept things civil until the government stepped in proffering all kinds of riches, insisting, “Nonsense – it is all about you!” 

We could go on, noticing that most teens before the advent of psychiatry were treated like little adults rather than adolescents. They had responsibilities, and were not allowed to run wild. And if they did in spite of their parents’ best efforts, they had to face the consequences.  

They were not protected by the law from parental discipline, or from the biblical warning that to “spare the rod [is to] spoil the child.”

They were not wrapped in cotton wads of pharmaceuticals to mute the trials that might otherwise set them on the right path not only today, but for all eternity.  

They were instead beneficiaries of the principles expressed in chapter 12 of the New Testament book of Hebrews: “’My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him;  for whom the Lord loves He chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives.’  If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten?  But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons.”

Translation: the chastening of the Lord is good for everyone – including young people. If you’re not being disciplined, in fact, you are not His child. 

Consider what that might mean for one’s prospects in this life, and – far more important – for all eternity.

These are not entirely new problems. What is new is how defenseless we have become today, how incapable we are of dealing with them, thanks at least in part to a government and a culture that insist we handle “sensitive” children with kid gloves.

And we may be facing exponentially worse problems in the future, not in spite of but possibly because of the drugs that the psychiatric industry claims are the solution.

What I want to know is why no one is talking about any of this. My suspicions may turn out to be wrong; but I am not wrong about the elephant in the room. 

Why is the most obvious suspect being completely ignored?