deception on Gambling

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...

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...

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 ...

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

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 ...

To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

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.

[The flattery of others] is narcotic and addictive. It preys on two desperate and inescapable desires; to be thought well of by others and to think well of ourselves … We desire and need approbation s...

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 ...

Charles William Eliot (1834–1926), was an educator and long-time president of Harvard College(1869–1909). During his many years at Harvard, Charles W. Eliot frequently expressed reservations about spo...

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Our propensity to deceive ourselves about our place and purpose makes it so very difficult to see the truth of our lives, to understand the meaning of our moment in history and our responsibility to i...

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Our goodness is our biggest self-delusion, and all of us seem to be living with it.

One of the most dangerous driving situations is when it is raining at night. Not only are the streets slippery and visibility obscured by water on the windshield, but wet streets can reflect light fro...

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...

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

We rationalize to make life with ourselves possible in a morally challenging world. Often the motivation for rationalization, though, is quite different. In recent decades, psychologists have argued c...

While I am not one to see a demon behind every bush or spiritual warfare in every difficulty, the fact is that we are regularly engaged in the struggle against good and evil—whether we know it or not....

At some point in childhood we all make the powerful discovery that we can manipulate the truth about ourselves.

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

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity.

The most insidious deception in human history is the lie that says, “God is against you.”

We may find it hard to believe Jeremiah’s words that the heart is “deceitful above all things.” We would rather look outward and think, Yes, others may be quite foolish and misguided. But I have a ...

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...

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 ...