If a religion’s leaders teach doctrines that contradict one another...
If the flock they guide is easy prey to religious stupidity and superstition...
If the religion has divinely revealed books from which it cherry-picks...
If the religion ignores science and does not urge people to investigate in case the religion is not the truth...
If the religion shows no sign of being any better than atheists, secularists, and witches...
When there are plenty of examples of religious charlatans suffering for lies — e.g., Joseph Smith of the Mormons...
THE RELIGION IS BASED ON DELIBERATE LIES. What else would we be supposed to think?
THE HARMS OF LYING
A lie intends to hurt the truth. To hurt the truth is to hurt people. A lie always intends to harm. We may not be conscious of that but we know it deep down. We have motives - often malicious ones - that we bury deep inside us.
We tend to think that people only lie for some tangible benefit — but we forget that lying is mostly engaged in by people seeking some psychological benefit. This error encourages us to rationalize it when a person lies to us: “I must have misunderstood. He had no reason to lie to me. He didn’t do it for money.”
It is said that lying is bad because it opposes the truth and reality. It puts people at risk of being hurt. If the truth is distorted, it gives you a distorted view of the world and what has happened. Even if a lie does not hurt the person you lie to, it can lead to problems for others. It can bury the truth forever.
The liar has an advantage over the person they lie to. Thus, it is safe to assume that, because of this advantage, lying takes place far more often than it would if liars were not getting away with it.
Most people feel at least a little bad about telling a lie.
If they believe in God, they have something additional to feel bad about: they have to feel bad about doing what He does not approve of.
A lie is bad enough when told by an unbeliever; their intention, to some degree, is to hurt people. But for a believer in God, it is worse. The person tries to hurt the God of truth, who forbids all lying. And if God is so perfect, it follows that we should tell the truth to please Him. He deserves it. If people are hurt by the truth, that is a necessary evil — for God comes first.
We hear that some people do not lie to hurt others but because they are afraid and insecure. That is still hurting others — it is trying to harm a person because you don’t feel good about yourself. It suggests that you do not trust them and see them as posing some danger to you.
YET
If lying were eradicated, we would have a very different world. There would be less on the internet — most web pages are laden with lies. There would be no spam emails. There would be no anti-ageing creams advertised all the time that do not work. It would be a less interesting world. There would be no exaggerating. Despite the badness of lying, the world would not function without lies.
WHY WE BELIEVE LIES
The thought that we are not lied to much is comforting. We deceive ourselves into failing to see how many lies we are told daily.
We have a truth bias — we tend to believe what we are told. Why is that? Here’s why:
People do not have the information or the skills to check out most of the things they are told every day.
We tend to be lazy thinkers.
Having evidence that you are lied to is not necessarily the same as being able to prove it. There will always be doubt, and that boosts the amount of lying that goes on.
People tend to only expose themselves to information that fits or supports what they want to believe.
Most of the things you are told are not that important. If your friend lies about having had a shower this morning, who cares?
You are biased towards believing others DESPITE the fact that you engage in deception frequently. You put on a fake smile. You wear clothes to make yourself look deceptively good. You lie a lot to yourself and to others.
Nature has programmed us to basically conform to what the people we are close to and live among want of us. We won’t always conform, but generally we will. Thus, we will generally tend to believe what we are told.
We are not all programmed to conform to the same extent. And the degree of success the programming has for me can vary from year to year.
People want to believe the lies they are told that flatter them. They want an inflated ego — but such an ego leads to fear. There will be feelings of vulnerability in the face of anything that threatens to expose the façade.
People want to believe those who lie to them that they have the solution to their problems.
They do not have the time to investigate.
It’s unrealistic to expect people to even want to check out most things they are told.
The person may choose to forget that they were lied to.
HOW LIARS WORK
People who are bullied by those who say, “Do not judge,” will be taken in more easily by liars.
So the liar has an advantage. The liar is not very likely to get caught out. And even if he or she is, there could be a way for them to do one of the following:
Make the victim of the lie think it was a misunderstanding.
Downplay the lie or its nastiness or importance. People tend to think they are not liars when they lie spontaneously or as a knee-jerk reaction. They may think that of others too.
Make people unable to decide if it was a lie or not.
Make the person lied to insecure and forgiving by making them see they tell lies too.
The liar will feel empowered if they blame their victim for being deceived. People tend to think that if something bad has happened to them, they must blame themselves: “What could I have done differently to avoid that?” The liar may try to take advantage of that.
The person who lies about unrepeatable events such as miracles has the strongest Liar’s Advantage of all.
THE WHITE LIE
People may ask, "Do I look good?" To spare their feelings, you will tell them they do. Why not respond that they look fine? That is a sensitive way to tell them they could do with improving.
People ask the question feeling that they want to be reassured and told they look good, even when they don’t look that good.
From this we see:
They want to be fooled.
They want to make you at least partly responsible for any bother they will get into over your lie.
They want to deceive themselves — it is illogical to seek comfort in getting somebody to pay you a false compliment.
They don’t worry enough that they are encouraging you to feel guilty about the lie.
They want to be insulted by you implicitly: "You don’t have the backbone to hear the truth."
They don’t want you to tell the truth diplomatically.
If you tell people exactly what you think of them all the time, you will be considered a jerk. This is unfair, for people should be big enough to face the truth. Thus, society bullies people to lie. Those who want reassurance and not the truth are accessories to that bullying and participants.
Being lied to is never nice, but do we think it’s nice to be told the truth all the time? We do not. But what is worse? At least with the truth, we can learn and get tougher. So being told the truth, though unpleasant, is better than being lied to. And being told the truth in a non-confrontational way is fine.
The lie may spare the feelings of the other person. It makes you selfish in the sense that you are telling it to avoid social inconvenience. And if we tell ourselves we are lying for the sake of the other person, we are lying to ourselves. To take away from another their chance to develop a thicker skin is always selfish.
SELF-DECEPTION
You love self-deception. It’s good training to help you deceive others. The best liar temporarily feels as if he believes his lie, and that makes it more convincing to the victim. The best liar must self-deceive and believe his own lie.
Cognitive dissonance is when you hold two contradictory things to be true and have to change how you think about at least one of them to reconcile the contradiction. If you lie to yourself, you are contradicting yourself.
You know what the truth is, yet you seem to believe that it is wrong. How can this be done? Psychology answers that it is done through cognitive dissonance. When you believe two contradictory things, what you do is alter one or both of your beliefs to make the competing beliefs fit together better.
Suppose a person has the urge to drink a lot. He knows he will enjoy giving in. He also knows that in a few hours it will trigger awful exhaustion and depression. But he still drinks. He does not alter his knowledge that he will enjoy giving in. What he alters is his knowledge of the bad consequences. He tells himself that maybe this once the after-effects will not be that bad. Or he may lie to himself, saying, "This will be the last time I ever drink, so the bad effects don’t matter that much in that context."
When people win an amazing prize — a prize to die for — they may feel that they got it because they did something good and it’s a reward. This is cognitive dissonance because they got it by chance, and they know it but don’t want to see that.
We know that driving a car increases the risk of dying in a crash. But we still do it. We turn off the reality. It has been found that depressed people can be extremely realistic about life and their own shortcomings. Self-deception can comfort us. Many depressed people are rational and see how awful things are in the world. The rest of us go around pretending that it is not that bad. Depressive realism is an interesting phenomenon.
People who think they are really good at something — say, tennis — will lie to themselves as follows when they mess up a game: "I am a good tennis player. I was just unlucky."
Religious people think God looks after them. When disaster strikes, they reason, "God is taking excellent care of me. I was just unlucky." It is superstitious to think like that. If God is really that powerful, luck does not exist.
DETECTING LIES
There is no way you can be sure that a person talking to you is really telling you the truth. It is said that we trust people despite knowing this.
People think that if the other person does not make eye contact while talking, they are lying. But the person may simply be tired or uncomfortable. We can all think of times when somebody behaved that way and was telling us the truth. What if a person has things they do when they are lying — e.g., pulling an earlobe? They may know they do that and use it to manipulate you. If they tell you something they don’t want you to believe, they can manipulate you by pulling the earlobe.
If we think we know somebody is showing signs of being a liar, we only think or assume it. We cannot be really sure, for we have made mistakes in trying to read people. The liar has the advantage there too. If the liar has a disadvantage, it will not last. We will soon learn that we cannot detect a liar from their behaviour.
You don’t have much of a chance to play “Spot the liar!” Is it true that you can lie to, say, your lover because you are committed to them? No. You lie in spite of your commitment. You prevent your lover from knowing the real you every time you lie.
People who are influenced by the liberal and relativist view, “Each person has his or her own truth. If you believe something, it is true for you,” will develop weaknesses in perceiving that something is a lie, even if it seems obvious that it is. And there is heavy pressure on people these days to claim that nobody has a right to tell anybody else they are wrong or that what they said was false.
APPENDIX
We don’t fully or clearly understand many things about ourselves = so we infamously make things up to compensate . Our opinions say more about us than them — despite what we may say. We project. We do that with God too.
The way we lie so much is strong evidence that this process is based on both our subconscious and deliberate dishonesty.