Lies and Consequences – Part I

I despise lies.  Big ones, little ones, white lies, and more nefarious ones – I despise them all.    Most of the little lies, the white lies are told to spare someone’s feelings or to avoid a perceived confrontation.    You know the kind where the obese woman asks her husband if “these jeans make my ass look fat?” and he replies “No, dear.  They look fine”.  Sorry, that’s not me.  If I am asked that I would answer honestly, “No dear, it’s not the jeans that make your ass look fat”.  I don’t reserve this just for others either, I think I am honest with myself.  I am fat, bald, old, sometimes arrogant, and overly enthusiastic about new found things (e.g., ideas, books, etc.). 

To me, the worst lies are those that you know are lies the moment that they are told – while the very words are leaving their tongues (or fingertips in the case of written lies).  You know, you filmed your kid with your camera phone doing something that they didn’t know you knew about and later they deny it.   I would prefer, or should I say demand, that others are honest with me.  When you lie and the lie is found out, you lose credibility with me.  Suddenly, I start to question whether other things you have told (or will tell) me are also lies.  It takes a very long time to truly regain my trust.

If I get so upset and mistrusting about the little “innocent” lies, imagine how I feel about the big ones.  And some of the biggest of all are being spread by the likes of Ken Ham (Answers in Genesis, The Creation Museum), Ray Comfort (“You Can Lead an Atheist…”), and other fundamentalists.  They lie about the lack of any transitional fossils in the fossil record.  They are there; go to any good natural history museum.  It’s an outright lie.  They lie about the age of the Earth being in the thousands rather than billions of years, but the science is there to back it up.  It’s another lie.  Comfort lies about what atheists believe (something comes from nothing) and what evolution is (“A dog never gave birth to a non-dog.  But that’s what atheist believe.”)  Both hogwash.  If one accepts the time tested Law of Conservation of Energy, then how could we possibly believe that something came from nothing?  An no one even slightly knowledgeable about evolution believes that it works the way Comfort describes it - as one vastly different species coming from another; such as a cat from a dog.  It’s all lies and there are many more related to abortion, contraception, morality, etc. - I'll get to those in another post.

By telling these lies, they have lost all credibility with me, not that they had much to begin with I’ll freely admit.  When I can so clearly see that these are lies, how can I possibly be expected to believe their bigger message about religion?  As much as I want these guys to fail at their evangelism, I want to offer them a little advise: choose your battles carefully and be honest.   They need to start looking at the facts and dealing with things honestly.  Then, maybe, if anything they have to offer about religion is good and meaningful; more people might take them seriously.  It would be more helpful in furthering their cause.  Of course, if they actually did stick to the truth and were completely honest, their cause would fade away into the dust of make-believe from which it comes.  Sorry guys, I guess it’s a no-win situation for you.