Response

Lying

Growing up one of my favorite movies was Big Fat Liar. In the film, a film producer Marty Wolf steals a story from a student about a character whose lies get so out of control that with each lie he tells results in the characters growth in size. In an attempt to hide the truth Marty spawns a web of lies that eventually comes untangled. Recently I revisited this childhood favorite and found the themes of lying and deception to be quite troubling.

For the past twenty-two years of my life I’ve been drilled with the notion that lying is wrong. As a child I read The Boy Who Cried Wolf, which preached the importance not telling lies. I received a mouthful of soap or a raw behind whenever I was caught in a lie by my parents. My dad repeated the quote "Pretty words are not always true, and true words are not always pretty" constantly as a reminder to avoid telling lies. Yet the older I get the more I’ve seen how often people turn to lying and attempt to rationalize those lies.

To protect their children from having to face the truth, parents often lie. Take my parents for example. When my Grandfather had a heart attack and fell into a coma, my parents told me he was just taking a nap. Because I was too young and naive to know any differently, I believed them. My parents rationalized lying to me by withholding information concerning my grandfather’s illness for what they thought was my own good.

Like my parents have lied to protect me, the government often lies for the protection of the country. The National Security Agency displayed this in March of 2013. When asked if the National Security agency was collecting any data on the general public the NSA director of national Intelligence stated “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.” We now know, thanks to whistle blower Ed Snowden, that the National Security Agency does in fact collect data, emails, and text messages as well as listen in on phone calls of hundreds of millions of Americans in order to protect the country from terrorism.

In some situations we even train people to lie. Take the military for instance. We expect the soldiers in our armed forces to withhold the truth and lie when captured by enemy forces in order to protect their comrades and our country.

We train our police investigators to lie to suspects to convince the suspect to confess or reveal information. Leading to the prevention of death or other crimes that other wise would be severely difficult to prevent.

Even the Bible displays a few situations when people were told to lie in order to save peoples lives. Jonathan lied to his father Saul, to save David's life. On Joshua’s conquest of the city of Jericho the Rahab saved the men that were in hiding through lying.

Perhaps lying isn’t as simple as good and bad as I was brought up to believe.  For instance, I know that lying for personal gain or to get out of a bad situation is almost always wrong. I can feel a pit in the bottom of my stomach and it just doesn’t feel right. What about lying to protect or prevent pain from reaching others? Maybe there are certain circumstances that make lying acceptable and others that make it immoral.