More and more any foray into the news feels like a trip to Bedlam – rational thought is nowhere to be found; the inmates are screeching inanities, drooling at the mouth, and throwing excrement at anyone who dares to speak truth, at anyone who even dares to say the word “truth.” It’s not fair, however, to point out your opponents’ faults without some backup. So allow me.

Logical consistency

Empirical adequacy

Experiential relevance

Those are a good place to start, but they need some elaboration. So, what is logical consistency? Loosely speaking, it means that the argument makes sense -- like so many left-wing ideas don’t. Note the mess the rabid feminists are in having become bedfellows with the transgender crowd; now women have to compete with men pretending to be women. They have to compete in wrestling matches, soccer games, track meets. Women are not only being robbed of the chance to win, but are also likely to get hurt. But the feminazis are not walking away from their bad bargain, and so far they don’t seem to notice the even worse covenant they’ve made sidling up to Muslim activists, who will eventually see to it that as many American women as possible will be raped, mutilated, and beaten.

Is this logically consistent? No. Just recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made the remark that she’d rather be morally correct than factually correct. She fails to realize that being factually correct is part of being moral. To use loose, sloppy, or fictitious “facts” to support something you think is ethically awesome is to undercut your own argument. Truth evidently is not part of her moral zeitgeist.

You see, a lack of logical consistency leads to divorcement from reality, and that leads to insanity. So we should step aside from Zacharias’ list to look at the three age-old Laws of Logic:

The Law of Identity

The Law of the Excluded Middle

The Law of Non-contradiction

The Law of Identity merely means that a thing is what it is and it isn’t anything else. In other words, it’s unethical and deceitful to pull a Newspeak definition shift on people. Our language is a contract that we have with others in our society and we mustn’t breach that contract. Remember back during the post 9/11 Iraq war when American soldiers were court-martialed for making Muslim captors parade around nude with women’s panties on their heads? Remember that? It was a nasty, disrespectful, and un-American thing to do. But do you remember what the press called it? “Torture.” That word has historically referred to the act of causing another person maximum pain either as punishment, or as inducement to spill secrets. Torture involved ripping out fingernails, pulling people apart on the rack, nailing them to crosses. Panty-hats don’t even come close.

The left has been majoring in language reassignment for decades. Their favorite is to label absolutely anything a lie. Oh horrors! Trump said Obama had a 10-foot wall around his house and it’s only eight feet! Perhaps he should have crept up to the Obama house at midnight, toting a steel tape, and gotten an accurate measurement. But a lie?

The next of the laws of logic we need to look at is the Law of the Excluded Middle. Both the left and the right have failed to adhere to this and are making less and less sense as the days go by. The Law of the Excluded Middle merely points out that in most issues there is no neutral. If you take five-year-old children and you plug them into a public school system that never mentions God -- not in discussions of origins in science class, not in historical analysis, not in psychology classes, not in ethics discussions -- and you leave those kids there for 12-16 years, they have been taught, by default, but taught nevertheless, that God isn’t. He has been excised from their world. That is not neutral. If the only teachers a school employs are politically left of center, that’s not neutral. We fool ourselves if we think that news reporters and judges and pastors -– or imams -- are neutral. In fact, the clergy’s efforts to be neutral have sadly broken the church.

The last law is the Law of Non-contradiction. A statement cannot refute itself and be true, be logical. The postmodern mantra, “There is no absolute truth!” -- usually said with great didactic gusto, is such a statement. “There is no absolute truth,” is an absolute statement and therefore argues against itself. How can one stay sane if one actually believes such tripe? One can’t. College professors love to play this dishonest shell game with their students. Slip ideas around fast enough, which is easy once ideas are distanced from their source, and you can convince anyone of anything. Do we wonder why our young people drink themselves through high school and college? Why the drug overdose problem is what it is? They are being driven to madness.

Let’s go back to Zacharias’ breakdown of truth. His second standard is empirical adequacy. You can’t find truth without facts. AOC doesn’t grasp that, but most of us do. From its inception the global warming farce was troubled by the lack of information. In order to know what the average temperature actually is we have to measure everywhere –- tops of mountains, middle of oceans, the steppes of Russia, the jungles of the Amazon. The temps also should be at ground level, not up in the stratosphere. And we need data from all four seasons, night and day, rain or shine. We need to factor in cloud cover, etc. Since most sampling stations are located in heavily populated areas, that variation has to be factored in as well. And then we need similar data from hundreds of years ago. The best we could do was computer models and they haven’t proven reliable. We need empirical adequacy to know what is going on here and we don’t have it. But the left plows on anyway and since they deny the existence of truth, I guess that isn’t difficult.

And what about Zacharias’ third criteria -- experiential relevance? What we actually observe in our own lives has to factor in to the concept of truth. I love the leftist canard that people are all basically good. My experience has taught me that most people are capable of at least brief periods of being nice, but nice is a long way below good. If we believe that all people are good, then we aren’t worried about MS13 gang members, ISIS terrorists, or pedophiles snatching our kids, because they’re all just misunderstood and they just want a better life. The left assumes that all people think like they do, and live according to their standards. But the illegal crime stats tell a different story. So how do you process such data when you start with original goodness instead of original sin?

I want to close with a standard of my own. Truth must line up with the Word of God because truth is God; it is embodied in the persons of the Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all incapable of the lie -- in fact the head defecting angel, Lucifer is called “the Father of Lies.” What God tells us about Himself, and therefore about truth, is the final arbiter, and right now I see a complete distancing of the Democrat party from anything even close to godliness. They booed Him three times at their last convention -– and then believed they could win the election. They have walked away from absolute truth and therefore from sensible policy and therefore from sanity. Without truth they cannot prevail -- I dare them to try.

Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing and public speaking.