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. 17. The effects of lying. (to self, to loved ones/friends, to society, death penalty)
"Charles Spurgeon said this:
When a heart is untruthful, when honesty has gone from it, then it is prepared to be the seed plot of every evil thing. Any crime is possible to a liar. He who is rotten with falsehood will break at the touch of every temptation.
It just means that if a person will lie, and develops a pattern of lying as a way of life, that person will do anything. Someone who becomes good at lying loses his fear of being discovered and will move on to any number of evil actions. He becomes arrogant and self-assured. He comes to truly believe that he is above the law. You should fear people like this. If such a person is caught red-handed in a lie and confronted with the evidence, that sort of man or woman will be forced to admit it, but he won't like it. It will make him angry and vengeful. He will do all he can to move on and leave it behind. It's what the Bible calls evidence of a seared conscience, not a sensitive conscience, but a seared conscience.
We are to be people of truth, not in any self-righteous way, but humbly speaking the truth. Proverbs 12, verse 22: "God delights in those who tell the truth." Titus 1:2, "God cannot lie." John 1:14 tells of the Son of God that he was "full of truth." He is described in John 14 as "the way, the truth." We are told by St. Paul, in Ephesians 4 and 5 to speak the truth in love, laying aside falsehood, taking up only that which is true."
http://www.thefallschurch.org/SERMONS/1998sermons/981227jy.htm
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Seven Results of Lying:
1) You will attract liars into your life and business dealings.
(Prov 17:4 KJV) A wicked doer gives heed to false lips; and a liar gives ear to a naughty tongue.
Prov 17:4: Verse 4. Flatterers, especially false teachers, are welcome to those that live in sin.2) You will lack understanding.
(Psa 119:104 KJV) Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate every false way.3) You will never enjoy permanent success.
(Prov 12:19 KJV) The lip of truth shall be established for ever: but a lying tongue is but for a moment.
Prov 12:19: Verse 19. If truth be spoken, it will hold good; whoever may be disobliged, still it will keep its ground.
(Prov 12:19 NIV) Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.
(Prov 21:28 KJV) A false witness shall perish: but the man that hears speaks constantly.
Prov 21:28: Verse 28. The doom of a false witness is certain.4) You will eventually end up in bondage and failure.
(Gal 2:4 KJV) And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage:5) You will eventually be punished.
(Prov 19:5 KJV) A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaks lies shall not escape.
Prov 19:5: Verse 5. Those that tell lies in discourse, are in a fair way to be guilty of bearing false-witness.6) You will become a fool.
(Prov 10:18 KJV) He that hides hatred with lying lips, and he that utters a slander, is a fool.
Prov 10:18: Verse 18. He is especially a fool who thinks to hide anything from God; and malice is no better.7) Your lies will always come back to haunt you.
(Psa 7:14 KJV) Behold, he travails with iniquity, and has conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood.
(Psa 7:15 KJV) He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.
(Psa 7:16 KJV) His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.
Determine today to speak the truth!
http://mcu.edu/papers/destiny.htm
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The practical value of truth:
"For contemporary society to survive at all, men must believe in truth. They do the work and no practical, i.e., logical system can function on lies. In the highly developed system of contemporary society, where all labour is divided, each man must be able to work with, and rely on, the other. If men were to take to lying when the moment seemed opportune, say in matters such as train schedules, freighters' capacities, or the amount of fuel left in an airplane's tank, the effect on our commercial system would be disastrous. Within a very short time there would be complete chaos.
chapter "Commercialized Prayers" in Esther Vilar's 1972 book The Manipulated Man.
http://www.uccs.edu/~cwetheri/GRT/Lying.html
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The results/cost of lying:
"This is because something happens in a relationship once someone lies to the other person--one person is now hiding something, and the other loses trust, one of the most important aspects of any relationship. The person who is lying is bringing dishonesty and suspicion and fear into the relationship, all extremely damaging elements. And, interestingly enough, one lie leads to another as the liar tries to cover his or her lie with more lies, once the other person starts to feel the suspicion. What happens to trust? The person being lied to usually wants to trust the other, and the liar wants to be trusted, but knows that he or she doesn't deserve the trust--it's a vicious circle from which there's no escape except telling the truth, a painful remedy that many people aren't willing to face--they'd rather have the relationship end than tell a truth that may harm them by exposing their actions and their dishonesty."
http://www.livinglifefully.com/lying.html
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The "addiction" of lying:
He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truth without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." -Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr (August 19, 1785)
http://webpages.ainet.com/gosner/quotationsarch/quotations1/topics/lies_and_deception.htm
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Lying starts with the self:
"The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying- lying to others and to yourself." --Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
http://webpages.ainet.com/gosner/quotationsarch/quotations1/topics/lies_and_deception.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------The liar's dilemma:
"The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else." --George Bernard Shaw
http://www.madwed.com/quotes/Quotations/Newsletters/Leadership_Lies/body_leadership_lies.html
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"Lying, An Ethical Culture Perspective""When balancing the values involved in decision making it is important to consider not only the possible damage of a lie to a particular relationship but also the damage to society as a whole by decreasing the level of trust in the community."
--Judith D. Wallich, Pres., New York Society For Ethical Culturehttp://www.nysec.org/essays/lying.html
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The damage to the language and the resulting effects upon our society:
Exerpted from "Lies vs Language", an essay by the artist, Robert C. Wittig
"We humans live in a world of lies and broken promises... worse yet, promises that were never intended to be kept. They are ubiquitous, like air pollution, and because they are everywhere, one tends not to notice them, most of the time. I turned on my TV again, and let the advertisements wash over me. The 'T' in TV must stand for 'toxic.' None of what was being presented was true, by any reasonable, common-sense measure of truth, and yet I knew without a moment's hesitation, that if one were to challenge these liars in a court of law, the liars would win, and their lies would be held up as examples of bright and shining truth.
Automobile manufacturers, all of whom sell roughly the same product, offer vague images of sex and glamour as a part of their product. Under their smooth and shiny surfaces, these companies sell cars that unduly pollute, flip over, sport tires that explode, and pursue all sorts of other sneaky and dangerous practices. When confronted with their behaviours (on those rare occasions when such behaviour is actually brought under public scrutiny), their tactic is to deny, deny, deny, or to apologise, but to disavow any personal responsibility, and blame someone else.
This is just one simple example of a near universal situation, involving all TV ads, and the companies that use them. One can easily substitute soap, beer, computer, or any other category name in place of 'automobile,' and the situation will remain equally true.
All of our largest corporations lie to us, make promises to us and then break those promises as part of a pre-planned strategy, daily. Does this behaviour influence even the very language we use, to attempt communication?
Consider the Latin phrase 'Caveat Emptor,' (buyer beware) which is still in common usage after thousands of years. Consider its more recent cousin, 'fine print.' Language attempts to overcome the lie, the broken promise, the promise that was broken by design, even before it was made. Our system of law upholds the concept of 'fine print' in its courts. Essentially, 'fine print' is the corporation's way of cheating the individual, by using a special sub-form of the language (legalese), so that the individual cannot fully decipher precisely how they are being cheated. According to law, it is 'your own fault' if you did not read and fully comprehend the fine print, and yet, the lawyers who drafted that 'fine print,' and the lawyers who will uphold it as truth in court, know full well that it is nothing more than a clever lie, a promise broken by design, in advance of it's even being made, and written in a language that by design, the consumer cannot understand."
[The author also gives examples of politicians who make "campaign promises", our justice system which dispenses various and inconsistent forms of "justice", and the news media which claims "unbiased reporting".]
We now live in a society where all of the leading elements of our society, business, political, legal, insurance companies, news media, those we depend on for the truth, are lying to us, and making promises that they never intend to keep. Even our doctors and the pharmaceutical companies, who we depend upon for our physical and psychological well-being, can no longer be depended upon for the truth. Our justice system is dealing out several different flavours of justice, contingent on the personal and economic profile of the individual, and when this is brought to their attention, they angrily proclaim that it is not true, an exaggeration, etc. Yet in fact, there is not... there cannot be a judge or attorney who does not know the truth in the matter, and that any statement to the contrary is simply sham.
Of course, this sort of situation does not exist in a vacuum. If our large institutions are up to their eyes in lies and broken promises, then there is no reason to suspect that the situation ends there, and it certainly does not. People do not go to work, lie their behind ends off all day, bend the truth every which way to suit the moment's need, and then at 4:30 PM go home to the family, and be good citizens, Christians, and fine examples for humanity to follow. Our habits go home, and on vacation with us, once we learn them. It would then stand to reason, that the level of dishonesty in our society, and most likely in our species, is pretty much in the same state, from top to bottom. My own personal experience in life seems to bear this out; the panhandlers on the corner hold little signs saying that they are homeless, and in need of food, but I would wager that whatever money is given to these individuals will go towards the purchase of drugs and alcohol, and not food.
[The author gives an example of Israelites and Palestinians having "peace talks" to achieve a "fair and just resolution".]If enough lies are told, enough promises broken, enough meanings twisted, and statements made that do not compare favourably with the facts at hand, then there is no language anymore, only Babel (or babble, if you prefer the contemporary term). If words mean whatever one group of individuals (usually those in power) decide, and are subject to change not simply without notice, but with absolute denial that any change in meaning has even taken place, then there is no language, and hence, no discussion can take place, because after a certain point, nothing that is said, no matter how sincere, can be believed, or even understood to mean what the speaker intends, because there is now a new, alternate meaning in the recipient's head, that is completely different from what the speaker thinks he or she is sending.
While this comparison between Israel - Palestine, and the subgroups within the United States population may seem extreme, and to be stretching the comparison, think again. It is only a matter of time and degree of arrogance that separate the two situations; the instruments of social breakdown are already firmly in place. While the citizens of the United States appear, for the most part, to be speaking English, widely divergent socioeconomic groups within the society are only babbling at each other, using the same words, with separate and often completely opposed definitions.
There is no simple solution to our dilemma, and quite possibly, any solution at all may be beyond our grasp, or more accurately, beyond our willingness to grasp, as a species. We have been lying and deceiving for our own personal advantage since 'Caveat Emptor' and before... As long as the environment was large and stable enough to bear up under our weight, no matter how sick and strange our social experiments became, the sun would still rise tomorrow, and whoever among us was still alive, they could continue the experiment, making and breaking promises where they saw fit, fudging the truth, denying reality, whatever.
The present situation is quite different from all the situations that existed in the past, though, in that we now exist in such numbers, and place such an ever increasing burden on our shared planetary resources, that the fake little 'truths' we have become so fond of are now on a dangerous collision course with the large, immutable truths that science is presenting to us; the rules of nature. What will the life expectancy of our species be, if we as individuals cannot begin to grasp and apply a higher degree of self and interpersonal honesty in the immediate future, than we have in the past?
If we wind up being a species that is not fit for survival, it will not be war that does us in. It will not be our waste, that we continue to pump into the air and water that finally suffocates us. It will be our dishonesty that does us in. If we cannot say the truth, even when we can see it, then all of our beauty and vision will count for little.My knowing that you are a liar may be nice, and may be helpful in my life. Seeing my own dishonesty, and naming it for what it is, and then doing something inside myself about it, without force of legislation, on the other hand, would be a quantum leap forward, in human development. This is, in my opinion, the essential battle that humanity must face in the 21st century.
Seeing the truth is not enough. I must then say it, and finally, act on it. Otherwise language, one of our greatest gifts, becomes no more than babble, fit only for advertisements, fine print, and campaign promises."Robert C Wittig, November 29, 2000, rwittig@chicago.us.mensa.org
http://www.robertwittig.com/paper12.htmlIn a previous section, 22.4 Why do we lie?, we examined the main reasons for all lies. Mr. Wittig has produced a work that illustrates this. "ShadowLiar", an oil on canvas, Robert C Wittig, 2002, can be seen on his web page at http://www.robertwittig.com/full277.html
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Self-Destruction:
Caroline Keating, a Colgate University psychology professor who has spent 18 years studying liars. For those honest folk among us there is solace. Most liars and cheaters do get their comeuppance, Keating maintains. "Eventually deception is a dead end," she says. "People begin to believe their own manipulations and deceptions. And that can lead them to have very poor judgments."
"How to deal with deception: Everybody tells fibs, but outright lying is a dead-end road in business."
By Peter Korn, http://www.news.onvia.com/x7683.xml (Emphasis ours.)