Does (or did) Face Book Fact Checking Accomplish Its Goals


With the outrage against Face Book for dropping one kind of monitoring and retaining some other it might be a good time to talk about this entire business of "fact checking." I have a personal interest in the new Face Book policy because occasionally Face Book takes down a post of mine on this blog. When I click on "explanation" the word "community standards" and other verbiage shows up and I never learn what needs to be altered to meet Face Book standards. I experiment taking out bits and pieces and eventually it goes up. Maybe the new system will leave this little blog alone. I must mention I really have no grounds to complain about Face Book because I pay nothing and use it every day.

The fact check issue I'm wondering about involves religion. Today, and every day I suppose, there were a prominent article saying each of us has a passionate fear of death. The solution to this fear, of course, it to believe no one has to die. It does on to say each of us who believes we will never die is happy. All who believes there is literal death are unhappy. Of course, no one fact checks religions who are trying to take people's money or have power over them. 

Perhaps fact checking performed some service in politics or in advertising. But if it is OK to do politics while calling it religion, we are, and have always been, left unprotected. 

The standard schtick in Christianity is to claim everyone has a "longing" for the comfort of knowing they are being looked after by an invisible being. It would be ok for them to say, "Some people have a longing to be looked after by an invisible imaginary being." This would be honest but of course would not sell the that believing in the faith is "normal" and not believing is "not normal." When there were more Christians commenting on this blog I can't tell you how many times I was asked, "What's wrong with you, Jon?" This created the desire to ask the same question of the reader.

Fact checking would be a wonderful thing if it could be applied uniformly. Without that consistency there is a question about its usefulness.  

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