Disagreement and Debunking
By Perlan Alatiit Berg
Have you ever searched about an issue online only to get results with conflicting messages on the same topic? To an untrained eye, articles containing disinformation may be challenging to detect because they contain partial truth. Disinformation and fake news don’t have to be inaccurate; they only have to be misleading. Fake news and disinformation is not only a threat to our society, but it is proliferated to intentionally cause individuals harm because they affects our body (health behaviors), mind (misinformation persists even after it has been disproved), and spirit (fosters deception).
How then can we accurately identify disinformation from the truth? One of the simplest ways is to check the reliability of the source. Is the source trustworthy? In Genesis 3, the serpent successfully deceived man into sin when they were convinced by the deceitful serpent. Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden because they believed in an unreliable, untrustworthy source instead of the words of God. And so this is why Jesus “full of the Holy Spirit…was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” (Luke 4:1, NLT) to be tempted by the devil for forty days and show us how we can resist temptation and fight the devil’s lies.
When the devil said, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become a loaf of bread.” (Luke 4:3). Jesus immediately disagreed and quoted the only reliable source of truth, the Word of God, “No! The Scriptures say, ‘People do not live by bread alone” (Luke 4:4, NLT). And for the next couple of attempts made by the devil, Jesus rebutted using the Word of God, and the devil eventually fled–Satan debunked.
Today we are confronted with a sea of lies and disinformation that attacks our body, soul, and spirit. But thanks be to God because He has given us even better weapons for this warfare. “We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments” (2 Corinthians 10:4, NLT). Let us write God’s Words in our hearts and minds, fully trust our only reliable Source, depend on His faithfulness, and always be prepared to disagree and debunk the devil’s lies.
