Hey!, Wanna See Some Sin?
"Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet and show my people their transgressions and . . . their sins." Isa. 58:1.
22. Lies
22. 10. Contradictions and hypocrisy about lying:
A. "Everybody does it."
B. "No one wants to be lied to."We work at justification, qualification, or redefining terms in order to assimilate these mutually contradictory axioms* into our behavior.
*[axiom -- a self-evident truth or proposition; a principle universally received.]
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A. "Everybody lies. . . . And they do it often."
B. "I never lie. . . . Well, almost never. . . . And if I do, it is always justifiable."A. "I seldom if ever get caught in a lie."
B. "I can usually tell when someone is lying to me."
Why We Believe Lies
"If we were inside an enemy prison camp, we would know that most of what we heard or saw was propaganda at best and at the worst, an untruth. But in a world of deception, where people twist words to their advantage, we seldom question veracity or check sources. In the presence of someone we know, whom we suspect of lying, we often go numb. Why is that so?
Personal gullibility and vulnerability are frightening. We can't believe we are capable of being lulled into believing something that isn't true or that we trusted an untrustworthy person. We don't want to have to admit that we can be manipulated.
Confronting our potential for exaggeration and/or evil is embarrassing and painful. Truth reveals our own secrets -- the lies we've told, the things we've done and people we have hurt. It takes brutal honesty and courage to stare at our own dark side, let alone to confess it. The truth that frees also hurts.
Denial looks like less work. We like the person and want to believe what is being said. We want to go back to our job, our families, our lives. We pull the blanket of denial over our heads, convincing ourselves the liar is working on their "problem" and we are "being biblical" by loving and trusting one more time.
We are taught to trust. We teach our children that trust is a good thing. Trust is the best gift one spouse gives the other. In fact, trust is critical in any relationship -- whether it is between friends, employer and employee, the President of the United States and the American people, parent and child, husband and wife. When someone does not tell the truth and we find out, it disintegrates the relationship."
(source unavailable)
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A. We tolerate a lying (unfaithful) politician because he is faithful to his wife.
B. We tolerate a (private) lying individual who is unfaithful to his wife, because he is honest (faithful) in business.We accept lying if we can rationalize some trade-off of value. The larger the perceived value, the larger the acceptable lie.
"Public and private spheres. Before looking at specific cases, I would like to dispose of the idea that, where lying is concerned, there is an important distinction to be made between public and private life. Some people believe lying is more justified in one area than the other. This can cut either way: we tolerate a politician who lies because he adores, and is rigorously faithful to, his wife of forty years. Or we excuse a friend's marital infidelity because we believe him to be of complete integrity in business relationships.
Ross Perot pointed out, correctly in my view, that where lying is concerned you cannot separate the spheres. He did not want adulterers working for him because "any man who will lie to his wife will lie to me." You can test this assertion by asking yourself: why wouldn't he? Because his wife is a thing to him but I am a person? There is no answer to the question likely to inspire continuing confidence in the individual. Once we know that another violated a relationship of trust and reliance, there is no moral distinction to be drawn based on the "sphere" in which the deed occurred.
Human inertia leads to complacency sometimes. We tolerate the harm a friend did another because we do not want to give up a friend. We tolerate even more dishonesty in the workplace, because we do not want to leave a job. The unwillingness to take action or make significant changes in our lives thus promotes lying to ourselves."
"Lying", by Jonathan Wallace
http://www.spectacle.org/0500/lies.html
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A. "An occasional lie is justifiable because there are some who do not deserve to hear the truth."
B. "At one time or another, everyone will fall into this category.""As Sissela Bok points out, apologists for lying have long maintained that there are people to whom we owe no obligation of truth. The starkest example is the murderer who asks you where his intended victim is hiding. This hypothetical, discussed by every philosopher who has analyzed the phenomenon of lying, divides the absolutists from the relativists. Kant, an absolutist, maintained we must not even lie to a murderer. Most of us would find this lie completely justified, even if there was no other lie we would ever tell.
At the other extreme, we may create structures in which we "owe no obligation of truth" to large groups of people, based on such factors as race, geographical origin, economic status, or the mere fact that they are our "followers." Here the exception winds up eating the rule: we may have no obligation of honesty to anyone except a select few--and we may even betray those when there is something else to be gained. We can call this the "organized crime" theory of leadership."
"Lying", by Jonathan Wallace
http://www.spectacle.org/0500/lies.html (emphasis ours)
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A. "Lying is okay because "Everybody does it."
B. "Christ never lied."Christ never lied, showing that it is possible for us to live without lying to anyone about anything. God the Father does not lie. Saying "Everybody does it" is a lie. There are no valid excuses for lying.
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A. "We should always obey God."
B. "It's okay to disobey God in an emergency."
"IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK (THE 9TH COMMANDMENT)"
"From time to time, there is a "debate", at religious Internet forums and elsewhere, concerning in what ways one can "break the law of God in an emergency". Interestingly, there are much fewer postings about how one should obey God in "emergencies".
People always try to work their way around things with various excuses. Lying has often been one of the things the arguers want to have permission to do when it suits them."
(http://members01.chello.se/ontheway/lying.htm)
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A. "Lying is sometimes justified because it is in the best interest of the other person."
B. "Persons caught lying are never considered humanitarians, just liars."" . . . denying someone the truth is an affront to his personhood and a denial of the basic respect everyone is owed. This is true even if one lies for the sake of the person being lied to. Further, one of the main arguments Kant gives against lying is that it degrades the liar herself. At any rate, in addition to these moral arguments, one should add a powerful prudential one: truthfulness and the reputation for truthfulness is perhaps the most valuable asset a business person can have. In itself this doesn’t exactly explain why lying is wrong, but it does give business people a good reason not to."
Samuel V. Bruton
Asst. Professor, Dept of Philosophy and Religion
University of Southern Mississippi.
http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~sbruton/Lying.html
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A. "A half-truth is not really a lie."
This is an oxymoron. It's the same as being half-dead or half-pregnant. By definition, a half-truth is a half-lie.
"Whatever is only almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is the more likely to lead astray." -- Henry Ward Beecher
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H.L. Mencken said, "The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
John Sterling, in Essays and Tales, had it right: "There is no lie that many men will not believe; there is no man who does not believe many lies; and there is no man who believes only lies."
THE VIRTUE OF LYING
http://www.gridlockmag.com/rumblings/perjury/pg2.html
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A. We punish our children for lying, but . . .
B. We lie to our children and teach them by our example, to lie.
----------------------A. "I never want others to lie to me."
B. But by our responses we reward those who, in certain situations, lie to us.
-------------A. Employers won't hire you if they catch you in a lie.
B. After you're hired, you are expected to lie to customers, to subcontractors, and even to co-workers when it benefits your employer.
--------------------------------------------"Every one wishes to have truth on his side, but it is not every one that sincerely wishes to be on the side of truth." --Whately
Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth. When perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth, any cause to wonder that he does not hear it. --Tacitus
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
--Josh Billings
http://webpages.ainet.com/gosner/quotationsarch/quotations1/topics/truth.htm
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A. "Since we all do it, we must learn to do it for good purposes."
B. "There is no lie told that does not do some harm, if only to the teller.""But there are numerous people who would argue that Honesty is not always the preferred option. Notice this quote: "Lying is universal-we all do it; we all must do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with good object, and not an evil one; to lie healingly,charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, or maliciously.""
"Is Honesty The Best Policy?"
http://www.blountweb.com/churches/eastside/bestpolicy.html(Source of quote in text above, unknown.)
---------------------A. "The Bible shows that some lying is okay."
B. "The Bible condemns all liars and all lying."(See section 22. 16. Does God lie? Does the Bible show lying to be acceptable?)
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