The Age of Lies

I remember back in school studying history and marveling at the names they gave to periods of time.  Names like The Age of Reason, The Industrial Age, and most recently the Space Age and the Digital Age.  I think now we should give ourselves a new label:  The Age of Lies.  It seems almost every day we are presented with information that has to be decoded and even verified.  Shading or outright misrepresentation of information on products, events, political positions, or virtually anything is the menu for the day.  They call it “spin, putting a good face on it” and any number of other terms, but basically it is all lying just the same.  It is no respecter of persons, and comes out of the mouths of men, women, liberals, conservatives, Caucasians and blacks, etc.  Here are some whopper examples.

The news today was all about the misrepresentations by our government about the U.S. Embassy attack at Bengazi in Libya.  I’m sure we’ll hear about that for weeks now, though the media bias that shades or fails to report the truth will be ever present even now after the whistleblower testimony.

I noticed recently that a sports figure came out and admitted he was gay.  The responses varied, but one I noticed underlines the attempt to confuse and misrepresent.  A prominent Christian said his faith and the biblical support for it says homosexuality is wrong, but he went on to say that he applauded the sports figure’s honesty and his right to play in the games without harassment.  (Remember, Christians are still under orders to love those who don’t follow biblical guidance.)  However, the liberal anti-Christian media immediately shaded and tailored their response to make the Christian minister out to be a hate mongering homophobic monster.

Corporations spend a fortune on advertisements to sell foods and drinks as “healthy alternatives” that are really not much better than the fat bombs at national burger chains. 

The government proposes to tax internet sales “to make it more fair to competing brick and mortar stores” that have to charge sales tax.  Unfortunately, it is just a guise to rake in more money for the government, since brick and mortar type stores can sell on the internet, too, and have the advantage over purely internet companies of allowing the other customers to fondle the purchase before buying to see if it’s really what they want.

School teacher unions are saying all manner of negative things about home schooling and other alternatives to public education in an attempt to abolish the competition.  Yet when compared to the effectiveness of public schools the alternatives are often far better at educating.  The real goal here appears to be safeguarding higher wages for union teachers and having a forum to indoctrinate children with the “correct” politico-religious viewpoints.

The liberal side of government seems bent on demonizing the wealthy and criticizing them for not paying their fair share, yet they never mention that the rich right now pay nearly all of the federal taxes and are taxed at a higher rate to boot already!  Over 40% of Americans pay no federal taxes at all!!  Once again, shading of the facts rears its ugly head.

The Bible says the father of lies is Satan.  The Bible also makes a big point of reminding us we are not to lie in the ninth commandment.  A lie is a lie, whether a little one or a big one.  Spin and shading the truth is the same as lying.  Eve did it first when she essentially said “the snake made me do it” and we’ve been following her lead ever since.  We do it to make money, we do it to make ourselves look good and others look bad, and we do it to protect ourselves from consequences of our behavior…and it seems to me we do more of it today than we’ve ever done it before.  Now with the internet providing false and misleading posts we have little control over mass produced lies that reach far into the fabric of our society.  Misinformation and disinformation proliferate far and wide.  The question for us all now is “What do we do about it?”  A society that can’t tell truth from lies and is based on lies has no stable future.