The old puzzle statement – “all men are liars and that’s the truth”. Luther made an interesting statement about truth. He said that truth and faith are interchangable. We have faith and give faith when we are truthful. When Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life”, he could have said “I am the way the faith and the life”. When Pilate said “what is truth?” he could have said “what is faith”? Because God is truth we can have faith. Because God is faithful we can have truth.
We are surrounded by lies. To watch a politician tell us “that’s the fact” and turn around and see that he is lying used to be a real stunner. Now we seem to be inured to it. A friend of mine who does taxes says that every time we hear that only the taxes on the rich will be raised people of lower incomes are always surprised that their taxes go up . He is aways surprised that htye fall for the lie over and over again. “I guess their jealosy over those that make a few bucks more than them overcomes their need to know the truth”, he said. We believe the lies because we hate the rich! What a great life. We forget that the famous Al Gore once said that millionaires should pay more taxes and when he was asked what a millionaire was he said, “if you make $50000 a year for twenty years you are a millionaire”. Most people I know do not think that 50000 dollars a year between a husband and a wife are rich, butI also see amny people who think that anyone who makes a dollar more than they do are rich so…..
Last night I heard an activist for gay marriage, Masha Gessan say that she gets a queasy stomach when she says she wants marrage rights. She boldly proclaimed that she lies. “We want to destroy the institution of marriage”, she said. Of course if I said that was the intention of Gay marriage all along, which I have, I am considered a liar and a radical. What should really get people frustrated is she said this last year and we are just finding out about it through the press. I guess we can be comforted by the fact that the press doesn’t lie – it just doesn’t relay the truth.
Now we find out that health care is not bringing costs down but that they have tripled over estimates, something the radical liars like me have been saying all along. We find out that most people will not be able to keep their doctors, something the radical liars like me have been saying all along. Religious organizations will be forced to pay for abortions and contraception (so far), something the radical liars like me have been saying all along. There are something like death panels, something the radical liars like me have been saying all along. Medicare will have to be destroyed under the health care law, something the radical liars like me have been saying all along. The health care bill is a train wreck, something the radical liars like me have been saying all along, but now the answer is to spend more money on it. The people who need care and who were promised would be the primary recepients of health care are the ones being thrown under the bus, something the radical liars like me have been saying all along. Let’s see what the real liars do when the mid term elections come up and see who runs away from health care reform.
On every main moral issue for the last few years we have been lied to. We were lied to about abortion, safe legal and rare. We were lied to about taxes, Social Security, the financial crisis, health care, education, border security, national security, privacy, relgion and it’s relationship to the government, and on and on it goes.
The lie is the death of man, his temporal and his eternal death. The lie kills nations. The most powerful nations of the world have been laid waste because of their lies. History knows of no more unsettling sight than the judgment rendered upon the people of an advanced culture who have rejected the truth and are swallowed up in a sea of lies. Where this happens, as in the case of declining pagan antiquity, religion and law, poetry and philosophy, life in marriage and family, in the state and society – in short, one sphere of life after another falls sacrifice to the power and curse of the lie. Where man can no longer bear the truth, he cannot live without the lie. Where man denies that he and others are dying, the terrible dissolution [of his culture] is held up as a glorious ascent, and decline is viewed as an advance, the likes of which has never been experienced. (Hermann Sasse, Union and Confession, Germany 1933).
