Most of us have found
ourselves in this kind of
situation, at one point or the other. Your mother asks you why you came home late, and you start looking for excuses to give with long funny tales. Your wife confronts you with a case of infidelity, and you lie blatantly to postpone the evil day. You travel over the weekend, and end up being late for work, or not showing up at all, and then you look for “authentic” excuses to give your boss; one that would even arouse his sympathy. You take the last three slices of bread in the house, and when everyone is busy asking what happened to it, you simply say you don’t know. You have N500 in your pocket, and your friend ask you for N200, instead of telling him you have, but also want to use it, you tell him you have just N200, which wouldn’t be enough for you either. Because you want to help yourself to the last serving of food, you tell your sister the taste is no longer good.
Lying is probably one of the most common wrong acts that we carry out, so it’s worth thinking about.
Most people would say that lying is always wrong, except when there’s a good reason for it - which means that it’s not always wrong. Lying is a form of deception, but not all forms of deception are lies.
Lying is giving some information while believing it to be untrue, intending to deceive by doing so.
There are many reasons people believe that lying is wrong, apart from the fact that the word of God says it is a sin.
Lying is bad because, a generally truthful world is a good thing. If people generally didn’t tell the truth, life would become very difficult, as nobody could be trusted and nothing you heard or read could be trusted – except you find out for yourself.
Lying does a lot of harm. Lies obviously hurt the person who is lied to (most of the time), but they can also hurt the liar, and society in general. The person who is lied to suffers if they don’t find out.
They are deprived of some control over their future because they can no longer make an informed choice about the issue concerned They may make a decision that they would not otherwise have made, amongst others.
No reason is good enough to lie, because one lie leads to other lies, and then the list becomes endless. Telling a lie may become a habit and if a person regularly indulges in one form of wrong-doing, they may become comfortable with wrong doing in general.
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