The Nature and Validity of Testimony

I wanted to start a medical blog today but then I realized how closely religion, law and medicine are linked. It's interesting to note that these three areas are where the priest-craft of governments tend to control.
  
The issue I wanted to address in my medical blog was the validity of human testimony in finding truth.  This is so closely tied to law that I felt it probably more appropriately goes here.

Testimony is so valid a path to truth that God gave us three testaments. The old (revealed by prophetic revelation), the new (revealed by the living Word of God), and creation (made by the will of God).  Within creation is both the scientific testimony of nature, and the temporal testimony of man, another creation of God, which we call His-tory.  

Without history the collective power of man would be crippled through time.  Each generation would start from scratch and no progress could be made.  When one learns history, one must decide which stories to believe because all history is biased by the testator.  It is thus in the multitude of historical testimonies that truth of the past is established and then can be used to build upon for future testimony.  If men follow a false testament, they decline rather than prosper.

The testimony of men is validated in the word of God:

Deutronomy 19:15: One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sins: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established.

The AMA and the FDA do not accept direct human testimony as a path to finding medical truth. This type of evidence is called anecdotal and is considered unadmissible in any medical research.  This is because of the placebo effect - ie: faith healing.

The current medical establishment's thinking is derived from humanism, the worship of man as a god.  This is done via that veil of human reason which is the collective image used to worship himself.

God calls man to not worship idols.  An Idol is anything created that is held in esteem as equal to the creator. When a man makes an idol, either physical or mental, and worship's it (ie gives it the respect due to the final authority - the creator) he is really worshiping himself or a false God such as the laws of nature.  Man is never to worship any created thing, only the creator.

When the AMA rejects direct human testimony as valid evidence of medical truth, it rejects the evidence of the supernatural which can only be discovered by personal experience or by human testimony.  

This is the consistent pattern of humanism, whether it be in science, medicine or law.  Humanistic reason demands the scholastic approval of a system of evidence based on proven techniques of reason applied to the material world only.  Thus medical research requires double-blind studies to be accepted as truth while the testimonies of individuals, no matter how many, are considered invalid.

This scholastic approach to truth holds the collective approval and the scientific method above any evidence of the supernatural.

To suppress anecdotal evidence rejects both history and the biblical testaments because the testimony of others is the only way we can see this evidence unless we experience the supernatural personally.

I am not saying that the witness of a single individual is valid.  Nor am I saying that the opinion of the majority is valid.  Humanism accepts both of these as determinators of truth which neither is.  For Example, when an emperor declares himself God, this is humanism using the witness of a single powerful individual as the measure of truth.  The same happens when a majority votes for an unqualified candidate for office and nullifies the law by mass opinion.

On the other hand, the testimony of two or three witnesses is a valid source of evidence if they agree and are not bearing false witness.  

The opinion of a majority is too tainted by the intimidation of mob thinking.  (Notice that a majority is greater than 3 as soon as the group size reaches the magic number 7).  It is the same influence that causes winners to win elections over properly qualified candidates that do not enjoy the support of the media, the establishment or some other idol of the majority thinking.

Double-blind studies and other techniques of the scientific method are not being rejected here.  It is their status of exclusivity over personal testimony that I object to.  When only these types of evidence are accepted, over time, via peer review and publication, they begin to establish a testimony of truth that can deviate from the whole truth because the exclusion of the supernatural.  The scientific method of peer-review can also be adversely affected by funding and other influences of majority-rule thinking that can over time lead to gross error being propagated as absolute truth.

Thus today we find most people initially using alopathic approaches to curing diseases that result in horrible statistics of failure.  This is preferred by most people over the naturopathic approaches because it is perceived that the majority support the alopathic approach.  This perception is created by the institutionalized nature of peer-review and scientific processes that mistakenly accept only mechanistic approaches to reality.  Meanwhile the true testimony of thousands of people cured by means not approved by the FDA ring in the blog-sphere.

I believe we are close to a revolution in thought.  One that will leave the humanistic rationalists in the dust.

The problem of public education

I have long wanted to post about this issue.  In other posts on this site I note the history of public education in America - how it came from the Northwest Ordinance.

Art. 3. Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

I think few Americans appreciate the down-side of public education, especially if it should lose local control.
It's not so much that the government has a conspiracy to dumb down the kids and turn them into slaves, but one should recall that the whole original structure of public education was invented by social engineers.

Pedagogy – this tradition of social pedagogy has its roots in the work of educational thinkers and philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and John Dewey. More recently Paulo Freire has been especially influential in terms of helping people to frame their thinking.

When one considers the history of England resisting the dual threats of the Catholic Church's Canon Law and that of the divine right of kings deriving from civil law, one sees that the high standing of scripture derived from the Anglo-Saxon heritage of common law acted as a check against total centralized power in either the King or the Church.
The belief systems of the people is probably one of the key factors in molding culture and government.
Centralized and childhood full-life education becomes a major way to first unite and then direct the next generation's social norms.

Unity of social thought:
I find this a major problem in itself.  When a society is increasingly presented with the same historical framework, the same ideological framework, the same cultural framework, they tend to all think alike.  Discovery, I feel, is best found by people of different frameworks and points of view.  As long as society holds truth in the highest value, diverse viewpoints should not harm society in the least.
However once unity is achieved, it becomes a powerful tool for the demagogue or salesman.  Knowing your audience is a key factor in rhetoric and enables a single line of reasoning to win a majority of minds.
I submit that the very Huxleyan dialectic we find ourselves in is a product partly of unification by the school system.

The introduction of humanism by education:
We got where we are first by the injection of a competing religion to that to Christianity.  The Scopes Trial marked that injection of evolution as a plausible creation explanation. Then, in about a generation of time, the bible was ejected from public education - the very reason for the creation of public education by the Northwest Ordinance.

The fruit of humanism:
Once a society can be converted to a humanistic view of the world, the good old might-makes-right becomes a plausible way of life and the stronger and smarter begin to amass power regardless of righteousness.  The checks of social morality fall away and we find ourselves in a lawless state where the innocent are trampled underfoot for a dollar.

The solution:
The only solution I can see is the abandonment of public education.  Home schooling reintroduces dispersed viewpoints and moral character and reduces the influence of the mob on the individual.  A return to sanity can happen only this way I fear.