Discernment

“These tips can be used when evaluating the flood of information and misinformation flowing into your life every day” - C.Post

“Today the Soviet Union is gone but newspeak and a thousand forms of disinformation thrive. I can do frontline reporting … and a reader will email to say I didn’t see what I saw because it doesn’t conform to a political narrative. She and the rest of us can fall prey to platform algorithms and manipulated content disgorged from a news cycle that never sleeps.

“So, if pointing out the lack of logic behind a conspiracy theory won’t work, what will? By God’s grace, what can we do? Here are a few thoughts that have emerged from wise friends who I have discussed this with” - Eric Geiger

“This is not to say that truth is relative or that reason doesn’t work or that persuasion isn’t possible. It’s just that, in the real world, believing and not believing are complicated.” - Veith

“By all means let us continue to be passionate for the truth and to use rhetoric and hyperbole when it is appropriate. But let us also lower the temperature so that we don’t attack others with rhetoric and hyperbole that will embarrass us on the last day.” - Thomas Schreiner

“It raises the perennial question about Christian engagement with pop culture, specifically artifacts like movies, TV shows, and music. How should Christians engage these things?

“Brett McCracken has written a helpful, short book on managing our information-overload world. He rightly notes that though we live in a world of exponentially increasing knowledge, such knowledge has not done much to make us wise.” - DBTS

“…avoid the hot take. Christians especially should be slow to speak. People are complicated. Explanations that focus only on external factors of race, gender, ethnicity, or legal requirements may miss the motivations that animate individual human beings…. ‘out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.’” - WORLD

“…a biblical worldview— not a secular one—provides the foundation for logic, making critical thinking possible. We can think critically because God is the source of absolutes. He created a logical universe and gave us faculties for reasoning.” - AiG

“These conspiracy theories, however, are not rooted in reality. Indeed, many of them come from the same sources that previously told us that the coronavirus itself was a hoax or, even worse, a ‘plandemic’ mapped out by the government for some purpose or another.