Lying Hurts the Liar
I came across this post in an old archive. The author was writing to teens about the Monica Lewinski scandal, but as I read through his wise words, I found myself thinking how appropriate the words are for all age groups:
Lying Hurts the Liar
If you lie, it will make things worse for you, too. Oh, you might get away with it once or twice, but you will get caught sooner or later.
How Does Lying Make Things Worse?
Lying makes things worse because it hurts your personal relationships: relationships with friends, brothers and sisters, parents, children, teachers and other adults.
Think of it for a moment. When you lie, it is a burden you have to carry with you. It makes you feel bad inside. You know you hurt your relationship with someone by lying. It violates the trust people have in you. Usually you have to lie again to cover up the first lie, and you feel even worse for doing that.
Have you ever noticed how badly you feel when you discover a friend has told you even a little lie? It hurts a lot. You wonder why a friend would do that to you. You think about it a lot, and you just don’t trust your friend as much after that. It’s not the same.
Then think about how you feel when someone is telling you what a good, good friend he is, and then he goes behind your back and says just the opposite. It destroys all trust.
A Way You Can Understand Lying
When you become a friend to another, you put your life in some small or large way into his cupped hands. You trust the person by putting part of your life in their hands. You want and need your friend to be worthy of that trust. When they lie to you, he lets your life slip through his hands, and is not worthy of your trust. How lonely that feels! How disappointing!
Lying harms not only personal relationships, but business relationships as well. In conducting business we also put ourselves into the hands of others. Our business associates need to be worthy of our trust. Take the simple example of going into a store and buying a box of chocolate chip cookies. The picture of the cookies on the box looks terrific. The chocolate chips look tasty, but you open the box at home and find cookies with no chips. You feel cheated because you believed what you saw. You believed a liar. No wonder you feel cheated. No wonder you’ll probably avoid that brand in the future.
Why Are We Tempted to Lie?
We are tempted to lie because we want something and use a lie to get it . . . That sounds a little selfish, doesn’t it? No wonder lying makes us feel lonely. No wonder the devil is called the father of lies.
We lie because we believe it will make things better. So you shoplift, and when questioned, say: “If I lie I won’t get caught. If I’m caught, they will be mad at me. I want to avoid the pain.”
Once we give into this temptation to lie, we start lying some more by saying: “I want to spare my loved ones the pain of knowing what I did.” So you try to spare them that pain by lying to them. That doesn’t make sense.
It’s like saying: “I’m not going to admit I robbed the bank because it will upset the police.” What kind of nonsense is that?
How Do We Respond When We Are Caught Lying?
Our response is usually to say: “Everybody lies. So what difference does it make?” The trick of a good liar is to attack the accuser. So when another kid accuses you of lying, you say: “Well, I heard you lie once.” It’s the “look who is calling the kettle black.” Attacking the accuser does not make the lie less a lie. It is still a lie. It still hurts relationships.
Your trying to justify lying by saying everybody lies is like saying: “Everybody hurts their loved ones so hurting loved ones must not be so bad.” Do you really believe that since so many people steal, stealing must not be so bad? It’s like saying everyone makes your life miserable so being miserable must not be so bad. This doesn’t make sense.
Why Are These Rationalizations Wrong?
Lies decrease the love we have for one another. They diminish hope. They extinguish trust and belief in one another. Lies are morally wrong.
Why don’t we just say: “Let’s forgive and go on with life?” Forgiveness makes us feel good, and like anything, it can be taken to excess. For example, if a person has no remorse, don’t forgive him just so you can feel good or look good. It mightily confuses the liar. Likewise, don’t forgive someone who has done nothing wrong. It confuses others.
On the other hand, don’t hold onto forgiveness as a form of vengeance. “I won’t forgive you because you need to suffer some more.” That’s like saying until you extract a pound of flesh, the score is not even.
The action of appropriate forgiveness is an action making the situation better . . . it produces a good set of outcomes. Failure to forgive in a situation where forgiveness is warranted makes the situation much worse.
It doesn’t do any good to censure a person who feels no shame, who feels no guilt. He will just make more excuses.
On the other hand, it does a great deal of good to refrain from censuring a person who already has censured himself. This is the person who really feels guilt and tries to make amends. Failure to forgive here is inappropriate.
It’s also good to remember that there is a difference between forgiving and condoning. Condoning diminishes the action. It’s inaccurate and it’s a cop-out. The religious call to forgiveness is not a call to be a sucker. If what was done hurt you, you need to say that, and not pretend it didn’t hurt and it doesn’t matter.
At every point a person has a choice to forgive or not forgive for the right reasons. Conciliatory personalities tend to forgive too much, too quickly. Aggressive personalities tend to forgive too little, too late. We need to strike a balance.
Is it Hard to Forgive After the Lying Has Stopped?
Yes, it is a lot easier to forgive when the person is trying to make up to you for all the lies he told you. Even then, it takes a long time for forgiveness to settle in. Why? Because the hurt is still there.
It is rather easy for a person who lies from time-to-time to quit. It can
be done rather readily if there is determination to do so. What about a person who lies habitually over a period of time and cannot quit easily or without consistent help? A habitual liar will be tempted to believe he just has to say he’s sorry, just as a habitual drinker will tend to believe all he has to say is he’s sorry. It doesn’t work that way. On the other hand, bull throwers, braggarts and exaggerators are a tiresome lot, but they are easier to get along with than habitual liars.
How Is Lying Made Worse?
The bigger the role model, the worse the lie. If someone I hardly know lies to me, it is bad. However, it is much worse if my mother lies to me. She is a much bigger role model in my life. That makes the lie worse.
That’s why the President falls off a mountain when he lies. Yes, he falls a great distance, and if he lies over and over again, he falls an even greater distance.
You may say that if we raise the bar too high, no one will run for public office. Then all we will get is the biggest bully or the guy with the most money. That’s really not our problem. The problem is just the opposite.
We need to raise the bar high enough so better people will run for office. We need to restore the expectation that includes honest behavior. The solution is not to take the bar away. To put it another way, if many people are lying, the solution is not to approve of lying, but rather to rekindle the fires of devotion. Otherwise, human flourishing is diminished.
Every time we see someone shoplifting in the store, we need to cry out: “Thief, thief!” Similarly, every time we see someone lying, we need to call out: “Liar, liar pants on fire!” We will be better off with fewer liars, not more.
These are just some of the reasons why the good Lord tells us not to lie.
Here is the source of the article: Girls and Boys Town.
Lenten Update
As you know, I gave up bad language in my car for Lent. Yes, I could have given up chocolate. It would have been easier.
I’ve done fairly well. I totally slipped up once, my husband was driving. At first I thought, “well it doesn’t count because I am not driving” but – it does. It counts.
I have not succeeded in not thinking the bad word. I ask forgiveness, and I ask for help not even thinking the bad words. He IS helping. My language is getting better. Alhamd’allah.
For my non-Kuwaiti, non-Middle East friends and readers, you can actually get in more trouble here for bad language than you can for crashing a car.
True story: in one country, a man was trying to get into a gated community and was refused. He was angry and wanted to back up, rather than going forward and turning around, so he put his car in reverse and gunned the engine and smashed into the car behind him. The woman driver was shocked, and just sat there. So he moved forward, and gunned the car in reverse, and hit her again! He did it a third time. She got out of her car and screamed at him “What are you doing, you a$$####???” and he had HER arrested for bad language. He stoically paid for the damage to her car, but SHE had to go to court and through a lengthy humiliating process of finding a lawyer, etc. She also had to pay a huge fine and listen to a lecture from the judge.
A wise person NEVER makes any hand gestures, either.
Giving up bad language on the highway is not only a spiritual improvement, it could also save me a lot of trouble down the road.
Good Omens
When our son asked me what I might like for Christmas, I told him “find three really good books that I probably wouldn’t buy for myself.” I can trust him to do a great job because:
1. He has alwasy spent a good amount of time hanging out around books.
2. He has a good idea what I buy for myself.
3. He has a whacky sense of humor.
Good Omens, by Niel Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was one of the books he and his bride gave me, and it was a riotous good read.
This book is not heavyweight – you can read it on one leg of an airplane trip or two or three nights before falling asleep. It treats a very heavy topic – The End of Days/ the Apocalypse in a very irreverant, very funny way. It treats the characters of good and evil – angels and devils – as real characters. In spite of the lightweight plot, there are some interesting – and hysterical thoughts.
Crowley, the demon/devil who was placed on earth to torment and tempt humans, hopes the end of the world will be a long way off . . . through the centuries, he has grown to rather like people.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff that they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of nastiness. There had been times, over the past millenium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves, and they do things we’ve never evey thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
The Anti-Christ is born, and cosmic events get underway. But . . .this being Earth, and bureacracies being as they are, things get screwed up. I’m not going to get specific; it’s part of the droll fun these authors have with us as they write this book. The Four Horsemen appear, but they ride motorcycles, and Pestilence has been replaced by Pollution.
As the situation heats up and the end of the world as we know it nears, Crowley ends up with an unlikely ally, the angel Aziraphale.
Now as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren’t deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors – doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operation of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren’t paragons of virture; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it.
Now, throw into the mix an ancient book of totally accurate prophesies that are sufficiently oblique to be disasterously mis-interpreted, The Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. “Nice” in this case refers to its oldest meaning, exact. And, while the prophesies ARE exact, finding out their exact meaning is another hilarious exercise.
All in all, a great read, a lot of fun . . . and underneath the fun, some little pinpricks of thought about human beings, the human condition, and our treatment of our world and one another that needle you long after you finish reading. Son, thanks, you chose a great book.
Dying Laughing: Al Qaeda in Seattle
My niece, Little Diamond has found a SATIRICAL article (I can’t figure out where, it is not The Onion ) on Al-Qaeda buying property in Seattle. If you know Seattle, and the pride Seattleites take in civility, friendliness, and neighborliness, then you, too, will die laughing. Click on A Diamond’s Eye View of the World for your grin to start the week.
And a part of me thinks – isn’t this what we are supposed to be doing? Be kind to our neighbors? Isn’t it the only way to interrupt the spiraling cycle of hatred and violence? Sometimes, an unexpected kind word changes everything – I know it has in my own world.
Isn’t Sodomy Considered Perversion?
Two articles from the Kuwait Times crime pages, but a daily occurrence:
February 27, 2007
Kuwaiti boy Sodomized
A Kuwaiti living in the Jaber Al-Ali area recently filed a complaint that a man offered his younger brother a lift while he was walking in the Mubarak Al-Kabeer area. He said the man then drove into the desert where he sodomized the boy after threatening him with a knife and also shot nude pictures of him.
February 28, 2007
Bedoons, Kuwaitis scuffle over attempted ‘sodomy’
Kuwait: Two bedoons travelling in a car in Riqqa spotten an eleven-year-old Kuwaiti boy standing in front of his house, and decided to kidnap and sodomize him. One of them alighted and tried to force the boy to get inside the car, but the boy started screaming; alerting other boys in the neighborhood who wrestled with the bedoons and managed to pin them down until the police arrived. However, the boy’s father when informed on the situation along with his relatives rushed to the police station where they encountered the bedoons’ relatives. Both groups were then involved in a scuffle. The boy’s father then stabbed one of the bedoons several times. The victim had to be admitted to the intensive care unit at Adan hospital. Police arrested the boy’s father and referred him to the relevant authorities.
My comment and question: In our holy book, Jesus says that the very worst punishment in the afterlife is for anyone who harms one of the little ones, one of the “innocents,” who damages that innocence in any way. I am betting the Qu’ran says something similar. (I welcome your feedback on this, because I would like to know the sura’a.)
And aren’t Bedoon’s MORE religiously conservative than other Kuwaitis? How does this track?
In western culture, men who ‘bugger’ other men are considered less than manly. Is this not also true in Islam?
Is sodomy not considered a perversion in Islam?
What is the penalty for sodomy in Kuwait, and how is the penalty enforced?
Donna Leon: Read and Savor
When I tell you about Donna Leon, I am really introducing you to a friend. I can’t remember when we met, but I can tell you that I seek her out whenever I can. Just listing her books, I realized there were several I hadn’t seen and I ordered them immediately, from the Amazon re-sellers.
“Why the resellers?” you are asking. Donna Leon is not that easy to find, in the United States. Some of the books in her series seem to have been printed only in the UK, which is a pity, because The Donna Leon books really need to be read in order.
While they can be a quick read, they are better read slowly and savored. It’s not that hard. Her humor is subtle, sometimes even sly. Commissario Guido Brunetti, her main character, lives in Venice. He has a family, a sweet wife – Paola, and a daughter and a son. He eats Venetian meals, he lives in an illegal Venetian apartment, he has a glass of wine or two with his lunch. It helps to read the books in order, as his children grow from childhood to teen-agers, and to grow older with him as he solves his cases.
But in Donna Leon’s books, solving the cases is not the goal. As often as not, even while Brunetti solves the case, justice is not served. The books are about the living conditions and social realities of life in Venice, and in Italy. The books are about painful subjects – child prostitution, traffic in women, blood diamonds and African immigrants, and about art fraud and Mafia crime and big business. And the book is about Venetian and Italian interconnections, so that some crimes just disappear, some evidence just disappears, and Brunetti’s dunderhead of a boss tells him to just look the other way.
While each book is deceptively short, and written in clear, simple language, the books are richly complex, weaving a myriad of details into each page.
Thanks to Donna Leon, I know what it is like on a cold, rainy day in Venice, when the water rises and you have to try to walk on raised boards to get where you are going. I know what it is like to have a family emergency and the police vaporetto is in use elsewhere and to try to figure out the fastest way to run home, crossing bridges, grabbing a taxi, complicated by the canal system and tourist infestations in Venice. I know when policement get together for lunch in Venice, you don’t talk business until AFTER you have finished your exquisite pasta with truffles, accompanied by a glass or two of the fabulous house wine. Donna Leon has taken me there.
In Death and Judgement, the book I just finished, Brunetti is called by a police sergeant who has arrested a former police sergeant and wants Brunetti to come to the station. Brunetti’s conversations with the arresting sergeant always require a lot of patience:
(Brunetti) “Did the people in Mestre tell you to make out an arrest report?”
“Well, no, sir,” Alvise said after a particularly long pause. “They told Topa to come back here and make a report about what happened. The only form I saw on the desk was an arrest report, so I thought I should use that.”
“Why didn’t you let him call me, officer?”
“Oh, he’d already called his wife, and I know they’re supposed to get one phone call.”
“That’s on television, officer, on American television,” Brunetti said, straining towards patience.
We’ve all been there. Dealing with those who think they understand, and their understanding is . . . imperfect.
In another part of this book, in which the major issue is the big business of trafficking in women for prostitution, Brunetti is having a conversation with his wife:
Paula pulled gently on his hand. “Why do you use them?”
“Hum?” Brunetti asked, not really paying attention.
“Why do you use whores?” Then, before he could misunderstand, she clarified the question. “Men, that is. Not you. Men.”
He picked up their joined hands and waved them in the air, a vague, aimless gesture. “Guiltless sex, I guess. No strings, no obligations. No need to be polite.”
“Doesn’t sound very appealing,” Paola said, and then added “But I suppose women always want to sentimentalize sex.”
“Yes, you do.” Brunetti said.
Paola freed her hand from his hand and got to her feet. She glanced down at her husband for a moment, then went into the kitchen to begin dinner.
If you are reading that interchange too quickly, too superficially, you will totally miss the significance of the last sentence. If you have been married a long time, you will totally understand that a whole lot happened. This is one of the things I love about Donna Leon.
Death at La Fenice
Death in a Strange Country
Dressed for Death
A Venetian Reckoning
Acqua Alta
The Death of Faith
A Noble Radiance
Fatal Remedies
Friends in High Places
A Sea of Trouble
Willful Behavior
Uniform Justice
Doctored Evidence
Blood From a Stone
Through a Glass Darkly
Giving it Up for Lent
Lent started today, our own holy season of repentance and fasting. When I was a little girl, children would gather and figure out what they were going to give up, like chocolate, or coca cola, or candy. Mostly, in truth, it didn’t last too long. We meant well, we took it seriously, but we didn’t have the capacity for that kind of long term commitment – 40 days (and 40 nights, too; we don’t get time off from sunset to sunrise.)
As adults, we can be equally wacky, but in different ways. We can give up something that is too easy to give up. We can give up something and then obsess about it until it makes up a major focus of our day. If we are very fortunate, with prayer and God’s help, we can truly give up something meaningful and stick to it, offering it up as a spiritual sacrifice to God.
I had a blessing this week. It didn’t feel like such a blessing at the time, but a great deal of the time this week I was driving, and I had riders in the car.
I had no idea my language in the car had deteriorated so far. I’m a pretty good driver, but this is Kuwait. There are things that are out of my control. And I discovered that occasionally, bad words pop out of my mouth.
I can only guess that it happens when I am alone, too, but I am not conscious of it. All of a sudden, when some bad word pops out of your mouth and you are NOT alone, you become VERY conscious of it.
I’m giving it up for Lent.
At first, I was going to allow myself non obscene words like “Idiot!” “Imbecile!” and “What are you thinking??????” but after lengthy thought, I think it defeats the purpose. No. I am going cold turkey, no obscenities, no outraged exclamations.
Perhaps an elaborate “I forgive you” from time to time. . . . Pray for me!
Stephen King and Hearts in Atlantis
You can be talking with serious people and watch their eyes change when they find you read Stephen King. I refuse to back down. Yep, I read Stephen King. I think he is a brilliant author, some books better than others, but when I am reading, sometimes I can feel my blood move faster through my veins as I wait for a life-threatening situation to resolve itself.
I can trust Stephen King. He taps into who we really are. I can also trust that most of the good guys will still be standing at the end, and most of the bad guys will meet a truly horrible and well-deserved death. I can trust that when bad things happen to good people, other good people will gather round, band together and the gestalt of all that willingness to help one another will prevail against the darkness.
The scariest book I ever read by Stephen King didn’t have any monsters, per se. It didn’t have the Walking Man, or any Wolves of Calla or any great evil, other than the evil that lurks in the human heart. The scariest book I have ever read by Stephen King was Hearts in Atlantis.
Hearts in Atlantis wasn’t even a novel, it was several shorter stories combined in one book. But the title story, Hearts in Atlantis, was about addiction. Not just any old addiction, either, but an addiction I had experienced.
It was my sophomore year in university. I had sailed through the trauma of freshman year with grace, great grades, I felt very confident. That summer, back home, I had taken bridge lessons, and holy smokes – I loved the game. It all made sense to me, and I loved figuring the probabilities and the possibilities, who had what card, how I could finesse that card, how I could WIN. I loved winning.
During the summer after my freshman year, I played a lot of bridge. So it was no wonder, when I got back to school, that I discovered a whole world of bridge players. Early in the morning, before my first class, I would head for the student union and pick up a coffee – and often a game.
The problem was, if I had a particularly good hand, the little devil on my shoulder would whisper “if you skip your class, you can win this hand!” and the bigger problem was – I would listen. I could afford to skip a class here and there, I did the homework. But through the year, I spent more and more time playing bridge and less and less time in the library. At the end of my sophomore year, my grade point average had fallen one full point.
That got my attention. I really wanted academic success. I spent my junior and senior years desperately working to get my grade point average back up to an acceptable level. Once the GPA falls, however, it only inches back up incrementally. It took almost straight A’s to undo the damage I had done to myself the year of bridge playing.
After graduation, I fell back into bridge playing on the duplicate level. But after a while, I noticed that while I travelled from place to place, it was the same smoke-filled room in every new city where we ended up, surrounded by a vampire-like culture that slept a lot of the day and only came alive at night. I also noticed that most of the conversations were about “the one that got away” – how such and such a hand might have been played best. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. So one day, I just walked away, and never looked back.
Like all addictions, from time to time I hear bridge calling. From time to time I will enter a friendly game – party bridge, but it is no longer irresistable, no longer so seductive, so attractive. Thank God. Reading Stephen King brings back the terror of addiction.
Anne Rice and Christ the Lord out of Egypt: A Novel
Remember Interview with a Vampire? Remember the feeling, as you read it, that you were probably treading very close to the essence of evil, and that evil was seductive and incredibly attractive? Anne Rice created a world of believable vampires, vampires you could identify with, vampires who created a cult following, and a legion of goth vampire wannabe’s, her prose was that seductive, that inviting, that . . . . irresistable.
Like a siren song, the voice pulled you from book to book, leading you along. With each book, a twist, and suddenly all the assumptions from the previous book were turned upside down, no longer valid when seen from another perspective. Rice lured you down the garden path step by step, and it’s hard to tell at what point you give up your will to resist the siren call.
Recently Anne Rice experienced a re-conversion to Christianity, and is now devoting her writing talents to serving God. This newest book, Christ the Lord out of Egypt, is as thoroughly researched as all the earlier books, and speculates on the early years of the Christ. The book opens in Egypt, with a seven year old Jesus, wise beyond his years but still a child. He sees things he doesn’t understand, he hears things he knows to be significant but doesn’t know why, and when he asks questions, like what happened in Bethleham around the time of his birth, Joseph and Mary, his parents, won’t answer. In fact, they don’t want him to bring up the subject at all, and they tell him they will give him the answers when he gets a little older.
Meanwhile, he hears things, and ponders them. He asks older relatives, and wise teachers. Little by little, he gathers pieces of a puzzle, the puzzle of his background and his identity. He accidently kills a playmate, and brings him back to life. He prays for snow, and it snows. He learns self control through the exercise of powers he doesn’t know he has, he learns to limit himself, and to hide himself.
With his family, they leave Alexandria and return to Jerusalem and then Nazareth, building a new life with their extended family. He grows, he ponders, and he is given a few more pieces of information.
You would think that with Anne Rice’s talent and with her research skills, this would be a fascinating book, but sadly, it is flat, and dull. I wonder why it is easy to make evil so seductively alluring, but it is so hard to bring goodness to life in a believable way? I read the book all the way through, hoping it would get better, but it never did.
There are people – Jan Karon comes to mind – who write about goodness and good people in a vibrant way, making goodness vital and attractive. Wish Anne Rich could find that vein.
Backing Against Hacking
This morning, a wonderfully quiet Friday morning in Kuwait*, I spent my time backing up all the entries in this blog. A fellow blogger, Fonzy went online to find his entire blog blank. Some mean-spirited hacker had gone in and wiped it out. Maybe those incapable of creating, destroy. I can’t imagine the nastiness it takes to wreck and destroy, to harm the innocent. I don’t want to try to wrap my mind around it, but I will take the warning.
Fortunately for the Fonz, he had back-up. Unfortunately for me, in spite of all my good intentions, I haven’t backed up in a long time. Months. So this morning I thanked God nothing had happened to my blog, and I backed it up.
It turned out to be kind of fun. I’d already forgotten some of the things I blogged about. Life moves on, and at such a rapid pace! And whew, now I am finished, at least for the time being. Thanks Fonz, for the reminder to back yourself up.
*For my non-Kuwait/non Middle Eastern readers, Friday morning is like Sunday morning in the western world. Relatively quiet, most people sleeping, not a lot of cars on the road – a day of rest.
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