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As a father, I can attest to the value of truth-telling as a human policy. At least that's the policy I want my children to cherish. It will save them from much wasted effort, social discomfort, and of course the anguish of being found out. God looks for it in us; integrity requires it. Mark Twain would have us all make it a habit. "When in doubt, tell the truth," he said (as his character Pudd'nhead Wilson) on developing it as a useful, economical trait of one's character.

All children need to know that truth is very much like an erector set: all those things that are true fit snugly together with other things we know to be true. Things that are false simply don't fit with the other pieces. You might be able to squeeze something false onto a piece that is true, but inevitably you won't be able to make those conjoined pieces fit anywhere with any other connections. At that point the erector set would simply fall down, unable to sustain the weight of the other truths within the matrix. Not for nothing did Mark Twain also say "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." The liar has to sustain his own fabricated structure, connecting what is false into other things that are false, like a virtual world of things not true. It takes some effort to sustain it and some can't keep their grasp on the fake world they've made. Clifford Irving couldn't, and he admitted as much in a later discussion with Mike Wallace about their 1972 television interview on 60 Minutes. Irving, you will remember, had authored the bogus Autobiography of Howard Hughes and was challenged on the book's authenticity. He publicly lied to Wallace, and to others. As his structure of lies fell apart, his book was openly revealed as a well-prepared hoax. "You wondered how I could lie so fluently to you," Irving said to Wallace in his later CBS interview. "That's because at some level, I believed everything I was telling you .... I believed I knew his life better than any biographer. Because I had imagined it." Irving was so caught up in his virtual world of lies that had trouble finding an exit: "I was lying to everybody .... I was on a train of lies. I couldn't jump off." Someone helped find an exit for him and he was sent to jail. [Source: "Liar, Liar," CBS News, March 14, 2000]  The telling of the lie, the misleading statement, plagiarism, embezzlement—these will always be found out, because what is false is always inconsistent with things that are true, and only time stands between the lie and its disclosure.

Is it any surprise, then, that a "lying tongue" is the second of six things God hates, among the seven he detests [Prov 6:17], and one of those practices we are to cast off as belonging to our life before Christ [Col 3:9]?

The fallacy of equivocation, again.  There is an informal fallacy in logic that reappears in the news now and again. The fallacy of equivocation (also known as the fallacy of ambiguity) is an error in reasoning that results when, in the course of an argument, there is a shift in the meaning of key terms. I remember back in the late 1970s there was a psychoanalyst who would appear frequently on television to rant against pornography. That was Ernest van den Haag, who died last year. He had an impressive body of clinical data to show the pernicious effect of pornography upon men's behavior and how it also affected their relationships. He was an advocate for government censorship, believing that pornography did not enjoy First Amendment protection, and was enthusiastic as an expert witness for the prosecution in pornography cases. He was very persuasive, but he lost me as a sympathizer when he started talking about magazines such as Esquire and Playboy as though they were in the same class as raunchy smut. So here was the equivocation: He would use clinical studies that relied specifically on raunchy smut to argue that mildly erotic literature was harmful. But in order for his claim to work, he had to contend that both were equally pornographic. It was like arguing that, because viewing a hard-core film can lead to personality disorders, looking at a drawing of a nude will therefore lead to a personality disorder.

Well, I think the same thing is going on in Gary Bauer's comments on the trial of Washington, DC, snipers Lee Boyd Malvo and John Muhammad. In his "Commentary: Crazy or Evil?" on Crosswalk.com, Bauer argues that Malvo and Muhammad are not insane or crazy—they are Islamic jihads intent on building a perfect Islamic society. About the drawings and rantings admitted into defense evidence, Bauer says: "They are proof not of insanity, but of an evil that will not stop until it has been defeated." So here is the equivocation: Bauer uses the behavior of two adherents of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, a radical Jewish-hating sect of Islam that believes in black supremacy, in arguing for the "defeat" of Islam as an evil. They aren't the same thing, and we need to keep this in mind if we are to be good stewards of God's word for a people who need to hear us speak clearly, not ambiguously.

Less heart in the heartland?  George W. Bush refuses to attend the funerals of American soldiers who are killed in the US-led conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, says the White House, he writes personal notes to the families of our fallen heroes. In their Newsweek Web Exclusive, Martha Brant and T. Trent Gegax report that Bush isn't even doing that—he sends a form letter. Everyone gets the same letter, and none is personally signed. [Source: Newsweek, December 6, 2003]

And then there's Joyce Meyer.  During his recent telethon on TBN, I happened to watch with amusement as Paul Crouch introduced Joyce Meyer with a strange admission—he hadn't met her before and really didn't know much about her. Where has he been? What's up with that?  He should read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which has been skewering Meyer in a series of in-depth special reports. Under a microscope, no one looks good, of course, but I was amazed by one interesting piece of news: Joyce Meyer Ministries pulls in $95 million per year, and yet contributes only $8 million a year to charitable interests. That's only about an 8.4% level of need-based giving. This year the ministry will give an additional $2.8 million for the St. Louis Dream Center, an enormous faith-based social service outreach project that takes up an entire city block in a poor part of town. From that venture, though, they will get back $600,000 in donations. So that would bring her ministry to at least a 10.7% gift level this year. The remainder is kept in the business, uh, ministry. [Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch at STLToday.com, November 17, 2003]