If Ron Paul “Is Always Right,” then how much more God?
There is a saying among some constitutional conservatives and libertarians: “Ron Paul Was Right,” or even “All roads lead to Ron Paul was right,” or some derivation of that thinking.
There is a combination of qualities about Ron Paul that make him a good and likely candidate to have the uncanny ability to so accurately predict the future and to so accurately identify the underlying problems we face.
Those qualities look something like this.
Because Ron Paul is
1.) so well rooted in the classics,
2.) understands economics theory,
3.) especially the heterodox and ultra-realist Austrian School of economics,
4.) has diligently read the works of the greatest minds to have ever lived,
5.) because he also knows the political realm after 10 terms in the US House and,
6.) knows the nature of man after delivering some 5,000 babies and all the time spent with humans in tough situations that entails, and
7.) is not attempting to chase riches for the sake of riches,
8.) nor to otherwise sell out,
9.) nor does he even seem to care who likes him, which is to say he does not pursue popularity for the sake of popularity.
Because of all this Ron Paul is quite effective at speaking words that can be VERY UNCOMFORTABLE TO HEAR, yet he gets it right so often.
It is uncanny. He is almost always right. I can not even think of a time when he got the root cause of an issue about the future wrong. Yes, the man has been controversial. Yes, the man has said and done the uncomfortable. But has he been wrong in his diagnoses of the root causes and the likely outcomes?
I can not think of such a time.
Because of this, I have reliably found myself accepting as a default how right Ron Paul tends to be. That means that I have moments when I look at some very uncomfortable thing that comes out of Ron Paul’s mouth and I don’t say “There goes that old kook again,” nor do I say, “What is he jabbering on about this time?” nor do I say, “Why do I even bother listening to this man’s nonsense?”
No, because I have a burning desire to know the truth, I do not do any of that. Instead, I have a very different approach to the uncomfortable things spoken to me by someone like that who desires to speak the truth and who has such a track records for being right — and not just right but will say the painful, deeply uncomfortable and unpopular things that need to be said.
Ron Paul is not the only one like that. There are plenty of people who aspire to speak the truth. But the man has a special combination of qualities that make him the most significant, accurate, and impactful public intellectual of the post 9/11 era, which is up to and including the era of corona communism that we now live through.
When I hear Ron Paul say the uncomfortable, I do not dismiss it or dismiss him. Instead, I say to myself, “Well, it looks like I have some studying to do to figure what exactly it is that the old guy is talking about this time. He has been right a thousand times, and he is probably right again.”
I approach with a presumption of accuracy. That is not to say that I let down my guard; I still treat his argument with critical attention and demand that it be an argument that is able to make some sense to me. Perhaps most importantly for me, I know it is my duty to do the work, because I presume that the words coming out of his mouth are studied, reasonable, and with purpose. So I approach with a presumption of accuracy.
Do you know how much easier it would be to dismiss the uncomfortable words? A lot easier. But it would be an evasion of the truth. So that is how I approach the uncomfortable words spoken by Ron Paul.
And if Ron Paul is always right, how much more is God always right?
I am reading through the Bible from front to back in 2023 with thousands of other as a part of the Bible project at 55hours.org. A member of that group wrote the following about our January 6 Bible reading:
“I don't understand why God is so mean. Is that the image of God in Genesis? The people are all so mean also. I don't understand why circumcision was the covenant between God and Abraham.”
Fundamental to approaching God, I believe is this same presumption of accuracy. The words of God are not lightly spoken. The words of God have made sense to millennia of the brightest minds on the planet.
God has not just had a solid track record since 9/11, God has had a solid track record since the creation. So how much more is that presumption of accuracy deserved. Well, I would say an infinite amount.
But God can feel so amorphous and even absent to someone who is so used to life in the material world. To some people, these words here spoken, comparing God to a man — perhaps even a man who they may not find all that enjoyable to listen to — may sound blasphemous. But that is certainly not the intent. The intent is to demonstrate in the material world, in the tangible world that there are men and women in our midst that we have the ability to provide with a presumption of accuracy and who very well deserve it.
It is only out of an unwillingness to walk in the non-material that we miss that, an unwillingness to understand that there is more that just the tangible in our midst that we miss this very important recognition that God too is out there and deserves a presumption of accuracy even more than anyone in our midst.
That can be hard to wrap the head around. But that is part of understanding God, I do believe. It is not necessarily to blindly follow. I do not know that I feel called to do that exactly, and arguably the Bible is not even asking us to do such a thing. Instead, I feel called to operate in a presumption of accuracy. God will reveal himself. God will make the wisdom of his ways known. To everyone? Maybe not. To those who seek Him though, he will.
This reader brings up the mean-ness of God in Genesis and is bringing up circumcision. Those are good specifics. I am bringing up the same topic but with the lens of the microscope zoomed out a little differently — which is to chunk up into a broader theme.
If you can approach God with a presumption of accuracy and put the work on you to understand God, then you can understand so much more about how He operates. And let me add to that — if you can approach God with a presumption of accuracy and put the work on you to understand God, BEFORE you attempt to criticize what it is that he is up to, BEFORE you dismiss him or BEFORE you call him “that old kook,” then you can understand so much more about how he operates, and you probably won’t end up criticizing God once you approach Him with that desire to presumption of accuracy. These may not be easy tasks. Like anything worth experiencing, they require growth. But I believe these behaviors richly reward those who seek to know God.
Read the Bible front to back in a year. 15 minutes a day is all that takes