Back to basics
TO THE EDITOR:
Our country is out of order. We have just let everything be OK. I have to blame the males in our country. It's a different thing between being a man and just a male species.
We have let everything gone wild.
Our country, our state, our town and county. Let our children raise
themselves. Let our women take control. They have busted the glass ceiling. It's time to be a man and take back control of our community, town children and women. God said (1 Timothy, 2:13), "For Adam was first formed from Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the
women being deceived was in the transgression."
Take charge, go back to church, pick
up your Bible. Let us men do church
like we clean our cars, go fishing,
hunting and work. Back to basics. The instruction was given to us by God. If
we start today, a change will come tomorrow.
Raydeen Edwards
Atlanta, Texas
Truth
TO THE EDITOR:
A false story is a lie only if it is intended to deceive. In fact, some false
stories can tell a deeper truth than
factual ones. For example, Aesop's fables are obviously false on the surface-animals cannot talk-but they contain morals and other life applications that could not be communicated as effectively without the narrative.
Also consider that statement ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth about removing the log hanging out of your eye before attempting to remove a speck from your companion's. The moral of judging
yourself before condemning others comes through much better by way
of that image than by abstract
moralizing.
So, there is a place for false stories of the kind that tell a deeper truth than fact. But, chances are that when you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you do not wax parabolic. You tell it like it is, as
the Hippies used to chant during Viet Nam and Watergate. And, to some degree, they were right to question
language of obfuscation and political expediency. However, we should not question one's honesty just because
he or she has a command of a sophisticated vocabulary. The late Democrat Sam Irwin of North Carolina, who became famous for his command of
language and his almost British Southern accent during the Watergate hearings, was once questioned as to how he
knew a document carried a specific meaning. His reply was classic: "Because I read English; it's my mother
tongue."
Our mother tongue should be designed to get rid of everything that is not the truth. As in Ephesians 4, we should practice speaking the truth in love.
Just as the sculptor scrapes away all that is not the work of art in a block of
marble, the skilled speaker or writer gets rid of obfuscation and gets down
to the nitty gritty truth. Truth is not relative. It is one thing, spin it how we will. And we must not get hung up in process and remember that it is truth we are seeking.
Daniel G. Ford
Washington, Ark.