The Man-Made Truth of 2+2=4

Our capacity to define a lie as a truth is equally as infinite as our ability to convince ourselves we are doing nothing of the sort. To illustrate the point, just consider the question,"Does 2+2 always equal 4?"

Argue with a Christian about "truth" long enough, and it is highly likely they will eventually try to prove the existence of "objective truth" by asking this very question. 

On the one hand, it has been demonstrated that, in fact, 2+2 does not always equal 4. It depends instead on what kinds of numbers we are using to process this equation, be they nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio.

On the other hand, the Christian apparently fails to see that they are offering as an example of "God made objective truth" something that human-beings are solely responsible for creating - namely, numbers themselves, and by extension the study of mathematics, which provides the basis for everything from chemistry to physics to economics and much more. To humans, mathematics is the only "science" capable of discovering perhaps the only kind of "objective truth" that can be known, at least by the human species anyway. 
  

Mathematics, simply put, is the mechanization of reality. By do so, we have become highly effective at revealing things we never could have discovered without such mechanization, even more of our thoughts than of our environments. It was in doing the former that we were able to do the latter, like learning to build and turn on a flash light in a dark room. But while it has shown us many things that are in the room, it can't see the air itself we happen to be breathing at that moment, or poison gas, radio-waves or airborne bacteria, and much else. As the Lakota Sioux medicine man John Fire Lame Deer pointed out, we live in a mechanical world we've created, with time forming the bars of demarcation, from seconds to hours to years, of worth and wealth and even intelligence, from our genes to our galaxies. 

As Lewis Mumford discussed in Technics and Civilization, we must even reset our calendars every four years to correct for how the machine of time we created fails to properly girdle and domesticate nature itself. On the other hand, the invention of time itself has proven to be perhaps the single most important development in the history of human domestication. So much so, in fact, that there is hardly an educated person on the planet anymore who understands that the "time" we think of is itself a man-made concept of measurement, one that crucifies nature itself to the cross of a clock. It is the clock, after all, that becomes the invisible hand that organizes society around running a particular kind of economy. And if humanity is to save itself from ecological suicide motivated by a rabid quest for profits, it must not only reconsider the limited kinds of economies it has thus far built for itself and relied upon, like an invisible "god" of material resources, but also ensurethat whatever economies we eventually "intelligently design" for ourselves are based on natural time.   

In the same way time is a straitjacket we struggle to slip over the unruly reality of life itself, so the priest and the economist likewise work to enslave human beings, one from within by controlling the soul through the mind and the other from without by controlling society through the distribution of resources, with both serving the same man-made trinity of father, son, and holy ghost, which the priestly class of economists refer to more nakedly as money, time, and the invisible hand. 

Thus, when the Christian claims that "objective truth" exists because 2+2=4, the necessary basis for this claim - the underlying assumption that this claim depends upon - is that mathematics represents an infallible language from God. Like the claim that the Bible is the inerrant word and the claim by the Catholic pope to be infallible in his pronouncements about "faith and morals" (a phrase ambiguous enough to include virtually everything and nothing at the same time), so the economist, and even more so the banker, become the de facto popes, because economists claim that economics is the only "infallible" social science because it's based on pure mathematics.

And who is the "pope" but the modern day medicine men, through who's sacrificial sorcery of the poor and defenseless have always been used to  turn the water of cold reality into the wine of riches and power. It's just that today those medicine men sacrifice those same poor souls while wearing a suit and tie and the manipulation of symbols (numbers) on a page, while sitting behind the comfort of their desks. Those desks are altars upon which, like the ancient medicine men of the Incas and Aztecs who cut out the hearts of their living victims to appease the gods of rain and fertility, the poorest people in a society must die so that the economy may live for everyone else. Ever increasing profits at the top, in other words, can only rain down upon the middle classes like crumbs for Lazarus from a rich man's table, through ever greater amounts of human sacrifice at the bottom. Money, as such, is Soylent Green. 

The Christian who thinks that 2+2 = proof of objective truth, then, is only worshiping the "belief" that mathematics represents a sacred branch of theology, one that provides humanity with an infallible language - given by the same God who wrote the Bible no less - with which we can understand the nature of reality, and thus the "true" nature of the will of God. From this perspective, the wealthy are "the chosen people" selected by the "invisible hand" of God, and the poor are atheists of the invisible hand.

Also, the Christian apparently fails to realize that there is no reason to conclude that any form of intelligence we might be inclined to define as superior to our own should know anything more or less about numbers or mathematics than all of those forms of intelligence we consider to be less than our own. In fact, even forms of intelligence that were similar enough to our own to have created both that are in anyway similar to what we have, might nevertheless have designed laws, equations, or entire systems, that are all mostly or even completely incompatible with our own.  

For the Christian, the example of 2+2=4 rests on a "belief" that the Christian has about mathematics, which is a "belief" that mathematics is an infallible language that comes from God, which is the same thing they believe about their Bible. And today,economics has become the new sorcery of resources, by inheriting the claim of infallibility from Christianity as its ever virgin mother and from mathematics as its ever scheming father, and finally united the warring thrones - thrones which have so often seemed antagonistic even as they worked covertly behind the scenes - of science and religion.  One controls the bread and the other the circus, and as the former starves people into submission, the other promises the bread of life in exchange for our love and obedience, and a willingness to become martyrs for the faith.