In today's highly contentious world, the "sides" have become more polarized than ever. We have "Red states" and "Blue states",  "Catholic versus Protestant", "Sunni versus Shia", Republican versus Democrat, "north versus south", "east versus west",  "global warming believers versus global warming debunkers". You can probably think of many other such comparisons.

Recently many politicians and pundits in the United States have been saying that people should be held to account for holding positions that are in disagreement with this belief or that belief. For example, former US vice president Al Gore recently declared that those who deny global warming should be "penalized" for their dissent and refusal to acknowledge that global warming does exist. If some were to have their way, there would be a law to make it illegal to disagree with any "official" government position.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin has jailed numerous detractors who have spoken out against him. One such jailed dissident is an all-girl rock band from Russia that wrote and performed songs that disagreed with Putin and his policies. They are now writing songs in a cold, distant prison camp in Siberia.

The saying goes that "those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it". China, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Belarus, North Korea, and many other nations have a history of murdering anywhere from thousands to millions of their own citizens, in an attempt to control and crush those who disagree with some sort of doctrine or belief.

What is it that so scares government, political or religious leaders that they are motivated to murder their own citizens or anyone who opposes their point of view? Why was Hitler so afraid of the Jews? Why did Pol Pot find it necessary to murder millions of innocent men, women and children in Cambodia? Why are leaders so eager to control thought and crush those who disagree with them?

Answer: Only liars fear the truth. The truth does not fear dissent, and always leaves itself open to thorough examination. One can find the truth as long as one is willing to accept the truth for what it is, whether or not it fits our political, religious or personal agenda.

Dissent is feared by those who know inside that they are lying or fear that what they want to believe is not true. They are willfully lying to themselves. In so doing, they have to try and force everyone else to agree with this lie in order to achieve their own agenda. When government leaders have this mindset, the result is a totalitarian state in which everyone is required to believe the "official state version of the truth".

The truth however, is immune to lies and does not fear dissent, especially considering that dissent is meaningless in the long run if it disagrees with real truth. The truth will always persist and cannot be eliminated. Lies fade away over time just like the memory of so many who have come before, attempting to force their version of the "truth" on the masses. In the end, the truth holds up, while the lies and the liars who tell them eventually fade away.

Wars, along with much pain and suffering are the historical result of such personal, political or religious agendas. We must remember the history of what has come before if we are to avoid the endless repetition of mass killings and endless wars in the name of this or that agenda. We must always remain vigilant to seek the truth whatever it may be, rather than allowing some leader or entity to define the "truth" for us.

Ever notice how many "experts" there are on television and radio these days? How many seminars there are each week in your city, featuring "experts" on a variety of topics. No question the world is full of experts. Political experts, media experts, military experts, medical experts, security experts, terrorism experts, you get the idea.

Do you ever keep track of what these experts have predicted? How often do you check to see if the weather expert in your town is right about the weather? Predicting the weather is hard enough, even with super computers and years of models used to predict what is likely to happen. Still we all know that, as often as not, the weather is not quite or not at all what was predicted. It's still about a 50/50 shot on those 10 day forecasts.

And what about the experts who think it's a good idea to do this or that? Invade Syria? Invade Iran? Invest in Gold? Buy mining stocks? Start a bottled water company? Stockpile food and weapons for armageddon?

Remember Y2K? New Years day, January 1, 2000 was supposed to be the disaster to end all disasters. Mass chaos would erupt all over the world as the worlds computers ran out of dates and began to shut down all at once. Pandimoneum would reign. It was time to move to the mountains and start farming. Y2K came and went with little fanfare and even fewer computer problems. The warnings did not come to pass, but many "experts" made tons of money off of the resulting preparations. Millions of dollars worth of books, supplies, guns, land, and computer programming services were sold as a result of the near panic that erupted from around 1994 until new years day, 2000.

Most of the time when something really big happens, something disastrous, the experts are also caught totally off guard. Take the Christmas Day tsunami of 2004 as an example. This massive wave killed 250,000 or more, and no one saw that coming. What about September 11, 2001. The US already had billions of dollars worth of security and intelligence services monitoring terrorististic threats, yet the terrorists who brought down the world trade center towers did it with our planes, trained for it in our flight schools and lived in the US with expired visas, right under our very noses.

What about the housing collapse of 2008? Did you hear any real estate experts predicting that one?

The core of "expert" motives is often money. None of the major housing experts wanted to admit that housing could collapse, right up to the day that it did. Ditto for the banking sector. Everyone involved was more willing to be deceived into believing a lie, than to objectively determine that the system was dangerously flawed with overpriced homes.

Deception comes in two forms. Deliberate deception, when someone wants to deceive you, usually to get your money, or accidental deception, when we believe something is true because that is what we think sounds right to us, or we would prefer to believe a lie instead of the truth, just because it fits better with what we assume could be the "truth". But the real truth does not care what we think or feel.

The fact is that none of us is nearly as smart as we think we are. Myself included. In fact, after living for 57 years, and making as many mistakes as most folks can make, I've come to the conclusion that I too, am dumb as a rock. But the good news is, once I realized this, I became an expert at realizing how much I needed to keep my own opinions and assumptions in check. Trust but verify.

I realized the key to being a "real" expert, who is right most of the time, is to always keep in mind that I do not know anything. This helps me be more humble and mindful that I could be wrong. In so doing, I find that I avoid jumping to conclusions or assuming that my own bloated opinions are fact.

I'm also better able to avoid listening to others who have bloated opinions of themselves. The key to being a real expert is to realize that we are not as smart as we think we are, and neither is anyone else that we are listening to.

Being willing to seek out the real truth, while being willing to lay aside our personal opinions and assumptions is the key to being a real, authentic