Truth or Lies

I've wondered how it is that people fall for lies, believe in lies, defend the lie, deny any facts that out the lie, happily embrace a new rationale for the lie in those rare circumstances when the original theory of the lie is disproven by observable, ineluctable fact. I'll admit, it's become more of a rhetorical question than a field of study at this point. After all, what is the truth?

Should we assume a statement to be true unless it can be proven to be a lie?

I'm not arguing that your opinion is equal to my facts or that my opinion is equal to your facts - and let's assume for a moment that we agree on what is factual and what is not; a Grand Canyon-sized leap of faith for the times we live in but let's start there, shall we? 

Unfortunately for this moment of comity, truth and lies aren't necessarily factual. 

Sure, there's a tendency to associate truth with the empirical; that which we can observe in nature and reproduce in a lab setting. 1 + 1 = 2. Fact, yes, but truth? And isn't there a kernel of truth in all good lies? Or maybe that's a kernel of truth in all good stories. 

Rather than basis in fact, aren't truths or lies just crowd-sourced opinions?

What if aliens came to earth and revealed that they too worshiped a creator god, but in their case, a creator god who didn't look anything like Charlton Heston (or Morgan Freeman) but instead bore a striking resemblance to Jabba the Hutt (that's right, it was Lucas, not Spielberg, who was the alien plant). I'm guessing the aliens would justify their truth by citing their advanced technology and the achievement of intergalactic space travel. My god can beat up your god. We would be the flies to wanton boys in this scenario. Would we shrug off Jehovah (or Yahweh or Bhagavan or well, take your pick) and start building houses of Jabba worship?

Maybe. 

I'd be betting the mortgage on intergalactic war as the more likely outcome.

Ain't no stinking space worms gonna tell me what to do with my Sundays!

Given our love of the underdog (there's no other explanation for all those "Mighty Ducks" movies), I can see millions of young people joining the underground (being intergalactically outgunned, the resistance would need to fight an asymmetrical war against the Jabbaniks), leaving behind old divisions and prejudices in common cause. 

There would be a moment when the alien Jabbaniks would ask themselves why they had to pick a planet with more guns than people before they remembered they had a death ray that would vaporize all human life on the planet in an instant, setting up a chain of events that would return the planet they called Eden to the pristine, green and blue world Jabba had described to them in the good book they called "On The Origin of the Planets."

Truth.