Tag: lying

Book Plunge: Irreligion: An Anecdote on Emotional Need

Why don’t I trust John Paulos? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I hated reading this section. I suspect Paulos wrote it to show that he is an understanding guy. If anything, it showed me that he is the exact opposite. It showed me Paulos is willing to engage in lying that intentionally harms others and do so for pure enjoyment.

He starts with talking about being in Thailand in an internet cafe. In the cafe are three girls and they are being coached by another woman who was their English expert. The women are communicating with men online and going from man to man playing someone who is totally lovesick each time.

The women see that Paulos is interested in what they are doing and so he starts explaining to them the phrases that they are using and what they mean. They would say these things to these men and then laugh hysterically and thank Paulos. He kept on helping them to learn what they needed to say to these men.

Am I justifying what these men are doing? Not a bit. These men are being suckered by women overseas and getting their money taken from them. However, I have a much bigger problem with what Paulos is doing. Paulos himself says:

It was great fun helping them dupe farangs on three continents out of their money via a Western Union office down the block. (Perhaps “dupe” is the wrong word since I think the bargain was a fair one and inexpensive at that: a Christmas fantasy for a few dollars.)

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 72). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Paulos enjoyed this. He knew he was tricking people ouf of money and enjoyed it. Not only that, but these women could have been part of sex trafficking for all we know. Paulos was enabling what they were doing which could mean that he was unknowingly participating in sex trafficking.

Paulos says he tells this story because of how so many people want to believe in God despite what he describes as gaping holes in their arguments. (Unfortunately for Paulos, the gaping holes are all in his understanding of them.) He says these people want to believe in God just like these men overseas want to believe these women desperately love them.

And what of my role, which, despite my rationale above, remains slightly problematic? I was doing the opposite of what I’m attempting to do in this book. I was facilitating an illusion, albeit an emotional one with which I have more sympathy than its religio-intellectual analogue.

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 73). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

So Paulos has now written a book where he explicitly talks about coaching women in lying to dupe men out of money, and then he expects us to trust him on anything? Not going to happen here. Paulos is the kind of guy based on this that if he told me it wasn’t raining outside, I would get an umbrella.

I encourage the new atheist movement to distance yourself from people like this who will openly confess to lying to dupe others and enjoy it. Accept him and you have no grounds upon which to condemn the person you view as the lying televangelist. I condemn both of them. Paulos apparently only condemns if it’s the other side.

Have nothing to do with people like this. When someone tells you who they really are, believe them.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Are Untruths Lies?

If someone tells something false repeatedly, are they lying? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I was watching a video today where the subject was the recent lawsuit against Alex Jones and how he had to pay out for what he said about Sandy Hook. Someone with me who heard me watching it was telling me that what was really bad about Alex Jones was not just what he said but he had lied about it knowing otherwise. I then played a clip where I heard Alex Jones saying Sandy Hook was 100% real. When I asked the person with me where Jones said he lied he said, “You just heard him.”

Unfortunately for the person talking to me, that’s wrong.

This is not to defend Alex Jones at all. He was entirely wrong in what he said about Sandy Hook. It was a horrible thing to say. However, that being said, he was not lying. Why?

Because when he said that Sandy Hook was not real, he said it because he honestly believed that it was not real. If he had thought it was real and yet he was saying it was not real, he would be lying. If he thought it was not real, and was saying it was real, he would be lying.

This also means that someone could even tell you something that is true and at the same time be lying. Suppose you hear about someone being a flat-Earther and you go up to them and ask “Is the Earth flat?” Suppose that this person though is scared by you and is a rather timid person and is scared of an argument and just wants to appease you and says, “Absolutely not. The Earth is round.” This person has just lied to you. It’s not because they told you something untrue. It’s because they were not honest with their words in what they were saying and told you something that was contrary to what they really believe.

Why bring this up? Often in the worlds of politics and religion, which often do coincide together, it’s easy to have the word lie thrown around carelessly. We are not only accusing someone of having their facts wrong when they say this, but we are also accusing them of an immoral action. If just saying something that was wrong was a lie, then any time that a kid puts down the wrong answer on a math test, then he is guilty of lying.

In order to show a lie, one must show that a person said X is the case, when they really thought non-X was the case, or vice-versa. Often, I prefer to think not so much about lies that are commonly told, but myths that are commonly told. For instance, it is a myth that Columbus sailed to prove that the world was round. Everyone believed that it was. Many of us were taught otherwise in school, but that doesn’t mean our teachers necessarily lied. They could have passed on something they thought was true as well. It just means people collectively bought into a myth.

Be careful with the term lie, regardless of what you think of the person. I have plenty of people who are my intellectual opponents, but I do not call them liars lightly. That is not just making a statement about what is said, but about the character of the person saying it and should not be done lightly.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Are Untruths Lies?

If someone tells something false repeatedly, are they lying? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I was watching a video today where the subject was the recent lawsuit against Alex Jones and how he had to pay out for what he said about Sandy Hook. Someone with me who heard me watching it was telling me that what was really bad about Alex Jones was not just what he said but he had lied about it knowing otherwise. I then played a clip where I heard Alex Jones saying Sandy Hook was 100% real. When I asked the person with me where Jones said he lied he said, “You just heard him.”

Unfortunately for the person talking to me, that’s wrong.

This is not to defend Alex Jones at all. He was entirely wrong in what he said about Sandy Hook. It was a horrible thing to say. However, that being said, he was not lying. Why?

Because when he said that Sandy Hook was not real, he said it because he honestly believed that it was not real. If he had thought it was real and yet he was saying it was not real, he would be lying. If he thought it was not real, and was saying it was real, he would be lying.

This also means that someone could even tell you something that is true and at the same time be lying. Suppose you hear about someone being a flat-Earther and you go up to them and ask “Is the Earth flat?” Suppose that this person though is scared by you and is a rather timid person and is scared of an argument and just wants to appease you and says, “Absolutely not. The Earth is round.” This person has just lied to you. It’s not because they told you something untrue. It’s because they were not honest with their words in what they were saying and told you something that was contrary to what they really believe.

Why bring this up? Often in the worlds of politics and religion, which often do coincide together, it’s easy to have the word lie thrown around carelessly. We are not only accusing someone of having their facts wrong when they say this, but we are also accusing them of an immoral action. If just saying something that was wrong was a lie, then any time that a kid puts down the wrong answer on a math test, then he is guilty of lying.

In order to show a lie, one must show that a person said X is the case, when they really thought non-X was the case, or vice-versa. Often, I prefer to think not so much about lies that are commonly told, but myths that are commonly told. For instance, it is a myth that Columbus sailed to prove that the world was round. Everyone believed that it was. Many of us were taught otherwise in school, but that doesn’t mean our teachers necessarily lied. They could have passed on something they thought was true as well. It just means people collectively bought into a myth.

Be careful with the term lie, regardless of what you think of the person. I have plenty of people who are my intellectual opponents, but I do not call them liars lightly. That is not just making a statement about what is said, but about the character of the person saying it and should not be done lightly.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

The Charge of Lying

What does it mean to lie? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I am a stickler for something in a debate or conversation and that is a charge of lying. Too often, when someone says something that is untrue, it is said that that person is lying. Actually, someone could be lying and in an odd way telling something that is entirely true. It depends on what is meant by lying. If we use the definition of telling something that is untrue, then any time you took a test in school and didn’t get 100 on it, you were lying on it.

To lie is to say something that you believe to be true and yet saying that it is not true or to say something that you believe to be false and saying that it is not false. If I sincerely believe that Jesus rose from the dead and I say that Jesus did not rise from the dead, then I am lying. If I sincerely do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead and I say that Jesus did rise from the dead, then I am lying.

This is important because the claim of lying involves a claim of moral turpitude with it. It is saying that the person who is saying something untrue is not only getting the facts wrong, but they are saying something with a malicious intent of some sort behind it. Of course, that could also be disputed at times. We can consider cases such as the Hebrew midwives, Rahab, or the question about if the Nazis ask you if you’re hiding Jews.

When it gets to that point, then the debate or discussion will often become a moral discussion instead of, ironically, focusing on what needs to be the main issue of discussion, whatever the truth is. It’s much harder to listen to the other side when you have already decided that that side has intent to mislead. It also puts the other person unnecessarily on the defensive.

If we accuse someone of lying, we need to be able to have reason to suppose that they know otherwise than what they are saying to us. If I believe X and you show me non-X is true, it does not mean that when I claimed X, I was lying. It could be I was just ignorant of some information or perhaps it could be that X is really right, but you present me with information that leads me to think it isn’t and I change my mind wrongfully from a true position to a false position. Either way, it does not follow that someone is lying.

And fellow Christians, we especially need to be careful of this. We are supposed to walk as Jesus walked and if we throw around the liar accusation too much, we won’t gain any grounds. Just consider people like Richard Carrier who constantly states any negative reviewer of his work is lying. After awhile, most of us have just stopped listening. Let’s make sure people don’t stop listening to us.

In Christ,
Nick Peters