deception on Arrested

Some time ago, when gambling was still illegal in the state of Massachusetts, four old friends were sitting in the back of a small New England general store, quietly playing poker, when the sheriff su...

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But n...

John Chrysostom, the eloquent Church Father, had incurred the wrath of the Byzantine (aka Roman) Emperor Arcadius. Enraged, the emperor consulted his counselors on how to punish the powerful preacher....

Lord of all, you are in control. We live under the illusion that we have control, yet all life is sustained by you. We live for our own purposes, we try to become gods over our own lives. We unjustly ...

He wonders if he’s lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him.

When Quentin Rowan published his first spy novel, Assassin of Secrets , it was initially received with glowing reviews. But five days after its release, it became clear that the novel had been al...

To be sure, groups, when they are functioning well, can be among our best defenses against vicious self-deception. But when group thinking is replaced by what psychologists call “groupthink,” results ...

Remember Aesop’s Fox? Having spied some ripening grapes on a lofty branch, he tried with all his might to jump and take them. Once it dawned on him that he would not—could not—succeed, sulked away, sa...

A man who is desperate for work applies to a zoo that he’s heard has some openings. “Well, it’s a little unusual, but I do have something,” said the zoo director. “Our gorilla died sometime ago, and w...

We will often stop at nothing to avoid cognitive dissonance. We will twist logic, bend reason, conveniently forget facts, invent new stories, even destroy relationships—all in the name of preserving o...

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

Evading self-acknowledgment of our faults enables us to avoid painful moral emotions: guilt and remorse for harming others; shame for betraying your own ideals; self-contempt for not meeting even our ...

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.

All: O Lord, you declare that the forgiven person is blessed, that the person who has no deceit is blessed. We confess that we have had deceitful hearts, deceitful tongues, deceitful thoughts, and dec...

Pastor: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” “Their throat is an open...

In The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor’s character Tarwater works hard not to think about his lost faith. But ultimately, we can only lie to ourselves for so long before we acknowledge the tru...

St. Martin of Tours was a Frankish soldier in the Roman army who abandoned his military post to follow Jesus at a time when Christianity had only begun to take root in France. He later became the bish...

Why would the apostles lie?....Liars always lie for selfish reasons. If they lied, what was their motive, what did they get out of it? What they got out of it was misunderstanding, rejection, persecut...

Holy and merciful God, we need Your grace and love today. We deliberately lie and speak falsehoods. We mislead and deceive with half-truths. We omit facts that make us look bad. We take pleasure in go...

It’s important, then, to have our eyes open to this deception. How is it that so many modern promises sound true but in the end lead to our deception, or even our destruction? A long, long time ago, t...

Our race would not have gotten far, Had we not learned to bluff it out And look more certain than we are Of what our motion is about.

Martin of Tours was a 4th century Frankish soldier who, after a personal encounter with Jesus, left the Roman army and became a hermetic monk and later a bishop. Dozens of stories of his life have cir...

In one fascinating study some years ago, subjects were presented with evidence suggesting that there was a correlation between heavy caffeine use and breast cancer. Subjects were then asked to report ...

Father, we speak the truth about who we are apart from you. Paul summarizes our condition in Romans 3 using the truth found in the sacred writings of the Psalter and Prophets, There is no one righteo...

Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.