Take away lies add truth

This month I will be starting to blog a second section of my book “God's Math. Take away what hinders, add what helps.” So this section is about taking away lies and adding truth. As I said earlier the world has trouble with the very concept of truth. But we don't seem to have the same difficulty with the concept of lies. We use it in our move titles, we accuse each other of telling them, and we get mad when somebody lies to or about us. It is of course inconsistent to believe in lies as a concept, and to deny truth. I mean if admit that there are things which are lies then there must be things that are not lies, which of of course implies that there is truth. This is the second time I have raised this question (see If you continue ... March 2012), but it is so fundamental and the propaganda that it is unknowable so widespread, we do need to revisit it.

We would know a lot more about what ails us if we were allowed to know. At an important time in my journey, a book “fell” into my hands which gave me insight into a lot of what I was struggling with. The gist of what the book was saying goes like this: “Most parents tell their children that what they tell them is the truth, even when it is a lie, and they are not allowed to know that it is a lie, and they are not allowed to know they are not allowed to know. This sort of thing is so widespread that most of us go round in a kind of semi- hypnotic trance (it is crazy making). If you wake up from this trance, you had better be careful who you tell, because those who love the most, are likely to punish you because they, bless them, are asleep”. The bit about punishing can come out in many ways, anger, punishing silences withdrawal, snarky comments, manipulative woundedness and the like. Most families have lots of unwritten but strongly held rules which one way or the other are strongly reenforced. My sister used to talk about “the look” mother gave! Such unwritten but strongly held rules can include: don't think, don't feel, don't speak, don't rock the boat.

I want to make is clear here that I am not into parent bashing. For more on this please read my October 2010 post “Most parents teach their children ....” There is much to say on these issues. In fact this sort of thing is much wider than the family group. It can be found in almost any organization be it religious or non religious, political or apolitical, social etc, etc. What I am saying is that we are all subject to a lot pressure to conform, to not “rock the boat” in terms of conformity to group behaviours and /or to cultural norms.

I said above that I am not into parent bashing. Most parents do the best they can with what they were handed, and life will go better if we are willing to cut each other some slack. Think about this, if you recognized your family rules in the above list of “don't”s, then it is very likely that your parents and the parents of your spouse were subject to the same pressures. And it was harder for them to deal with these things because they did not have the tools we have today. I said earlier tools that work can all be found in the Bible, and of course the Bible has been with us a very long time. However like a lot of Biblical truths they were lost to us as we failed to continue to put them into practice. This is a Biblical principle. It is only as our society becomes sicker and sicker, and as we start to see our desperate need to become whole that we become open to it. As I have also said earlier secular research can (and does) bring us insight, but only Biblical truth will set us free. We need God's help to get out of the pits we have dug for ourselves (see my August 12, 2010 post “Psychology without faith is lame”).

Some people will be unhappy with me calling some of the above things “lies.” We could of course use the expression “terminological inexactitude.” One dictionary puts it this way a lie is “a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive.” Others call lying “the telling of false statements; untruthfulness.” What is deliberate and what is not is not always clear. We will talk more about blame later. What I want to say here is that all untruth originates with the “father of lies” (John 8:44). And one of his biggest lies in the West, is that he does not exist (see “You believe in the Devil ... 2nd and 10th November 2010). In the “semi- hypnotic trance” I was talking about above, we likely will not know the difference between what is true and what is not. Most of us lie to ourselves too (Jeremiah 17:9). The only real antidote is “to continue in His Word.”