Lying
- Rosie
- May 21, 2022
- 9 min read
Confessions of a liar
I am going to talk today about a sin that seams small, but yet it disappoints a lot our Heavenly Father. This is the sin of lying. I am not going to and I have no interest in trying to present myself to be in any way superior to any of the people reading this article in the field of lying. I was actually raised in a family in which one of the parents is probably a narcissist, or at least highly narcissistic. Before some things happened to me that made me cut off communication with this parent, this parent had tried to exert a lot of control in my life and the things that I was doing. Honestly, I grew up lying and hiding about many things because this was the only way to survive in this household and live the life that I wanted.
In my country (I don’t know about other places), lying is not really considered immoral. The official view of the society is that lying is a small sin and that it doesn’t matter to do it. It is considered to be an insignificant sin, and thus, a sin that does not matter to do. It is considered to matter only when big things are involved and the lives or rights of others are affected by your lies (e.g. you can’t lie that you want kids, get married and then suddenly tell your husband/wife that you don’t want kids. There is nothing morally wrong with lying per se, but your right to lie stops when the right of the other person to choose a spouse who wants kids starts).
Since I was a very young kid I was raised to believe this and for some reason I didn’t question it and I just believed it. I am actually a person who doesn’t have many objections to questioning beliefs of society, but I was a very young kid then (primary school or younger) and I didn’t have much independent thought, so this may have been the reason why I just fell for this lie. I grew up lying for small things e.g. saying “I was in the theatre” when I actually may have been in a church. These are just small lies and most people in my country have no objection saying these, because small lies like these do not really affect the lives of others and nothing will happen to anyone if they think that you were in the theatre.
I grew up saying many such lies almost every day. I am so adept at lying and making stories that sometimes I do not even think before I lie. It comes automatically and the lie that would suit the circumstance comes automatically without needing much thought to design what lie to say. I am probably also a good actor because my parents really seemed to believe me in many things that I was saying. Or maybe they just trusted me too much.
I never lied for no reason. My philosophy always was that I had no obligation to say the truth to my narcissistic parent because this person doesn’t have the right to behave like this anyway (he/she continued some of these behaviours even after adulthood and when I was a child he/she was too strict for me and he/she even emotionally abused me whenever I disobeyed what this person wanted me to do):
a. This person has no right to restrict my life.
b. If I disobey him/her or not let this person control me, I will be kicked out of the house (I originally didn’t want that).
c. I was raised to believe that it is ideal to avoid lying, if you can, but it doesn’t matter too much if you do it in a small occasion, in which the lives/rights of others aren’t affected.
Therefore, lying is a good way for me to maintain the life that I HAVE A RIGHT to have, while this person has NO RIGHT to keep controlling me. Without lying this cannot be achieved. Thus, I used lying to have what should be mine anyway and I was just taking back what deserved to be mine to begin with (It is slightly similar to the “Robin Hood” philosophy, but not exactly the same. I don’t know if I am explaining it well).
I would also like to add that I am not a pathological liar or something (I have actually done a test). I only lie when it is necessary for survival and if and only if it is a small lie that does not affect the lives of others. I mostly lie to my parents and I rarely lie to people outside my family, as these people have done nothing wrong to me or I do not need to lie to escape their bad behaviours. I do believe that lying should be used only for “self-defence” and that you shouldn’t just lie to someone for no reason or for a silly reason (e.g. to make a good impression or make others feel pity for you for something).
These people have done nothing to you and they deserve the truth. I believe that I have no right to hurt them and hurt their rights in this way. I mostly lie when I deserved something anyway (the “Robin Hood” thing) and to defend myself. I wouldn’t just attack someone with lies, while they haven’t hurt me in any reason or haven’t taken anything that belongs to me.
What God actually wants for us
What God wants for us appears to be very different from what I had been raised to believe or what my philosophies say. It is actually ideal for a Christian to never lie. Yes, this is the truth, I am not kidding. There are many passages in the Bible and other important religious books that say this. To begin with, lying comes from the devil. Why do you think that Adam and Eve ate the apple, according to the story? Because the devil lied to them and claimed they would not die if they ate the apple, but instead they would become gods. This was a lie. Did you see what this lie did to Adam and Eve?
The devil is the father of lying (John 8:44). Lying and hypocrisy are things that come from the devil and are things that the devil does, so Christians should avoid them. For these reasons, nobody who lies ever reached a union with God. Therefore, Christians should avoid lying.
There is another thing about small lies that appear to not matter. People may not realise this, but you never really know for sure if they will actually affect the lives of others. This is probably just a myth. For example, if a parent believes that a child really likes the theatre, this belief may affect certain decisions that this person will take about this child or other behaviours that this person will adopt. How can you even be so sure that small lies don’t affect the lives of others? I once lied to someone about the fact that the city where I live is pretty dead and there is no nightlife here. Then, I discovered that he was asking because he was actually considering to move in my country and he was even considering to potentially live in this city…
I think that small lies often do not have a direct effect in the lives of others. It is not the same as lying that you want kids and making someone marry you, while you consciously know that you are ruining this person’s life because he/she wants kids. You aren’t necessarily directly doing something that is linked to ruining a person’s life. You are not harming someone by lying per se. However, problems to others may sometimes follow as an indirect result.
Small lies may have harmful effects on others. Someone once told me that he believed that a certain behaviour was not morally wrong (I understood later that he was lying). I didn’t believe that this was true anyway, but what if I had believed him and actually went out and done this behaviour? It makes me wonder if we even have a conscience when we behave like this. Maybe our conscience was somewhere lost during this society or whatever else rewiring we did to our brain to try to justify certain acts of lying that we are occasionally doing.
Moreover, another argument that I want to make is the very subject of claiming that something is small or big. I was with my boyfriend at some point and we wanted to inform my parents about his existence and let them know that I found someone. My boyfriend either has not been raised to believe in the concept of small lies or he doesn’t believe that any lies are small anyway. With this person we have a big age difference. He is actually about 10 years older than me and society doesn’t really accept this. My family doesn’t accept it at least. I told him that I would lie about something and then he said “You can lie about my age, if you want”.
I kept staring at him wondering if he could possibly mean that. I was like “What on Earth? Why would I lie for such a thing? I can’t just let my parents think that I am getting a man with a different age from the one that he actually has. Marriage is important. I cannot lie about such a thing”. Then, he replied something that surprised me “Well, I am not lying to people anyway, but since you are lying, I don’t see why you would not lie about this thing. If I were in your shoes, I would be tempted. What are the boundaries of what is considered important and what not? Also, if something is not important, why is it not important?”.
This reply actually surprised me. I understand that the boundaries are probably subjective, even though most people would agree that certain lies are very bad, making them relatively objective. Nevertheless, the situation isn’t that simple. I realised that I had been taught to believe that certain rights that people have do not matter so much and this is the reason why I believed that lying was not wrong.
I will give you an example. Based on my society, it doesn’t matter too much if I think that my brother still works at the café, even though he was fired last week and doesn’t want to tell his family that yet, so he is lying in the meantime. It matters though if he lies about being unemployed and starts taking money from the family, while he doesn’t need it (this is because people have the right to choose for which purposes to spend their money and by telling them a wrong purpose, you violate this right).
I still believe that the latter action is much more serious than the former, but why is the fact that someone misguided me about something per se not important? Are my feelings when thinking that my brother is at the café not important? Is the fact that a human being was deprived from the truth and deceived not important? Of course they are. We are important and all parts of us are important. Lying per se is definitely important, but I was initially too brainwashed since my very young years to be able to clearly see that. Any objection that my conscience would normally have on this was long gone as well (if it ever even existed). I don't remember if I have ever heard my conscience to tell me not to lie (per se) in my life. It is possible that I had before society taught me that it is okay to lie, but right now I can't possibly know for sure. I was too young to remember for sure.
If we accept the belief that "lying per se matters", then we cannot put a disctinction and say "this lie doesn't matter, while the others do". What logic would we need to follow to do that and why does a particular thing not matter? This is what my boyfriend probably meant.
I once also asked my spiritual father why the church tells people to obey certain rules that are small and unimportant like lying. My spiritual father replied that we (people) are under the impression that they are not important, while they are actually important. In the Bible in Matthew 5:19, Jesus says that if someone breaks a command because it seems unimportant and also teaches this to people, he will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Thus, it is obvious that Jesus doesn’t want us to break commands that SEEM small and that this commands are not actually unimportant. In contrast, if we really want to be saved, we have to love the truth and avoid any type of lies.
Finally, there is another part of the Bible that could be used for us to understand why we should stop lying. There is a “Golden Rule” that says that you should not do to other people things that you don’t like being done to you (Luke 6,31-36). Believe me, if people obeyed this, we would live in a better world. I don’t even know if sin would exist anymore. In any case, most people don’t like the feeling of being lied, so we should try to avoid doing it to others too. Telling the truth also sets you free, so there are many reasons why someone should be saying the truth.
Comments