Seeing/Believing

These days in art history, we are talking about the artist's in the "Ashcan" school (group) of painters in America in the early 1900's. The artists in this group preferred gritty scenes of America than the typical classical/fantasy subjects of the day. Most of the men had backgrounds in doing illustrations for magazines and newspapers and their art was influenced by that practice of arriving at a newsworthy scene and sketching it out. This was before it was possible to reproduce photographs in newspapers.

Think about it- if you were a reader, you had no real visual information to go on, you were held at the mercy of how the artist interpreted things. I made the comment to my friend in that class that we have come to that point again today.

Being able to manipulate images digitally is exciting, and I love being able to remove red eye, but we've reached a point that things can be so fake yet look so believable. There's also the opposite- photoshopped images that are not believable (Photoshop Disasters is hilarious!) but for the most part it's easy to tweak things. If you caught Elder Bednar's recent CES fireside, he shows computer generated conceptual images of temple interiors and their real life counterparts- and they're very difficult to tell apart.

Yes, it was possible to manipulate images from film but it was much harder to create anything realistic. It was much easier to tell if something had been painted out or added in- darkroom effects are not the easiest. I know from my own darkroom experiences that it was difficult to even paint out dust specks without it being obvious.

I think that we have to be really careful to not believe everything we see. You also have to question the source.

Case in point: Last weekend during Conference, one of the men in our branch had printed off these photos that showed these enormous skeletons being unearthed in an archaeological dig. He was showing them to us, he thought they were real. He thought that this discovery coincided with Book of Mormon stuff. He had righteous desires that these were real.

I saw the images and I thought to myself "I bet anything those are photoshopped." And later I looked them up at Snopes.com and according to them I was right. Apparently they were created as part of a contest and then several groups made fake news stories using these photos and distributed them in emails. Basically, you can't trust the majority of forwards that you receive. If these were real, wouldn't you see it in Time magazine or on the news? Besides my knowledge of Photoshop, how did I know these were fake?

The Holy Ghost did not confirm their truth to me.

Are there large skeletons? Sure. I saw photos of this in the Book of Mormon lecture that I recently attended, though they weren't this huge . But experiences like these make me very thankful to have the gift of the Holy Ghost so that I can know for myself what is true and what is not. You cannot put your trust in the world. I love knowing that everything that is good and true comes from God. We have to have faith in what we cannot see, relying upon the Holy Ghost.

"That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the slight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;"

Ephesians 4:14