Truth

"The question, Is it true? can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of "truth" -- mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historical, and poetical. No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has achieved; by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves. Yet, strangely enough, in recent years, for the first time in Western history, there is a dwindling concern with this criterion of excellence. Books win the plaudits of the critics and gain widespread popular attention almost to the extent that they flout the truth -- the more particularly those who review current publications, employ other standards or judging , and praising or condemning, the books they read -- their novelty, their sensationalism, their seductiveness, their force, and even their power to bemuse or befuddle the mind, but not their truth, their clarity, or their power to enlighten. They have, perhaps, been brought to this pass by the fact that so much of current writing outside the sphere of the exact sciences manifests so little concern with truth. One might hazard the guess that if saying something that is true, in any sense of that tern, were ever again to become the primary concern it should be fewer books would be written, published and read."

From How to Read a Book

How do we rate the importance or the value of the things we watch, read and listen to? Do we praise it for it's truth and noble merits, or simply for the pleasure it brings? Scripture states that we are to think about only that which is "true, noble, right and pure." Do the things we take pleasure in meet the criteria of this verse? May it be that we line up all that we read, view and hear with the only true thing on this earth: Scripture.