Tag Archives: deceit

Mystery and subterfuge in the blogosphere

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OK, an extra post today. Things are not always what they seem. Seems I’ve been had, deceived by some people who feel that the New Covenant allows us to use lies and deceit in our dealings with one another. Interesting, to say the least.

Had a new commenter come in and begin commenting on an old post. Someone else jumped in claiming “I have been a member of the Church of Christ for many years, but have never heard of this kind of teaching.” This person would ask questions, encouraging the other commenter and keeping the thread alive. The “seeker” spoke of how convincing the first man’s arguments were and how wrong I was.

And I fell for it. Sigh…

The one who had “never heard this kind of teaching” is Daniel Ross, who has long maintained websites promoting the teachings of Dan Billingsly. (Some will know that name) Had he participated honestly in the thread, I would have had no problem with it. But coming in deceitfully and lying about being new to these ideas… well, that’s just not right.

You see, “Albert,” the one who had never heard this teaching before and was being convinced of its truth, uses the same IP address as Daniel. That can occur when two people are on the same network, but it does reduce the likeliness that “Albert” and Daniel don’t know each other. However, in creating the lie, Daniel made the mistake of using one of his own e-mail addresses for the fictitious Albert. Is it possible that someone gave up an e-mail address and someone else now uses it? Yes. But to have the IP address and the e-mail coincide… that’s too much.

I’m hoping that Mickey and Daniel don’t know each other, though if they do, I hope they’ll be honest enough to come clean.

I’m guessing that when some discuss the Bible verses that have nothing to say to Christians, they must include these as well:

“But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” (2 Corinthians 4:2)
“For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile:” (1 Thessalonians 2:3)

Sleight of mouth

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When I was a kid, I really enjoyed magicians. Even though I knew it was a trick, I still became a part of the illusion.

Sleight of hand, or prestidigitation for those who like using big words, is usually a big part of any magician’s act. A lot of it depends on getting people to look at the wrong thing, on distracting your audience with a diversion while you are doing something else.

I think that we need to create a new term: sleight of mouth. To really catch what’s important, we often have to look at what people don’t say, rather than what they do.

One place where I think this is true is war. There is a natural fog of war that clouds the information process; even those involved don’t know everything that’s going on. There’s also a manmade fog of war, where those involved practice sleight of mouth, saying only what they want people to hear.

One of my language teachers in Argentina was able to illustrate this for me. She was living in Los Angeles during the 1982 Malvinas (Falklands) War between Argentina and Great Britain. She said that she heard news from three sources: the United States (which she could hear for herself), Argentina (which she heard from friends there), and Germany (thanks to a neighbor). The U.S. news consistently presented the news from the viewpoint of Great Britain. The Argentine news was slanted toward Argentina, so much so that when Argentina surrendered, her friends wouldn’t believe her when she called them. (“How can that be? We’re winning.”) In the end, it was the German news that seemed to be the most objective.

What makes me wonder is why it’s so hard to find out civilian death totals from Iraq and Afghanistan. I can understand the difficulty in knowing how many enemy fighters have been killed, but it seems like our government could present a clearer picture of how many bystanders have been killed. Actually, we know that they can: the Wikileaks documents confirmed the numbers that non-government sites have reported.

So why doesn’t our government talk about this? Sleight of mouth. Nobody wants people thinking about the tens of thousands of people who have died. Let’s focus on the three thousand or so that died 9/11 or the four thousand or so U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Talking about the deaths of over one hundred thousand civilians might dampen the enthusiasm for the war. Let’s talk about something else.

We should mourn those one hundred thousand as strongly as we do the ones who died 10 years ago in the terrorist attacks. That needs to be said time and again. Let’s not be children who are deceived by a magician’s tricks. Let’s not just look where they tell us to look. Let’s look at the whole picture.

There’s a reason why we keep saying we want to “fight them over there.” Because if those one hundred thousand dead were American citizens, this country would look at things in a whole different light.

Can We Be Too Trusting?

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“It is better to trust a person who should not be trusted than to distrust a person who should be trusted.” I heard that proverb years ago, and the long I live, the more I agree with it.

I’ve chosen to believe the best about people as long as I can. That’s gotten me into trouble several times, including the two times I was robbed at gunpoint. I’m sure that I’ve been swindled and cheated, scorned and ridiculed for that very trait. And I’m sure it will happen again.

But I don’t want to come to mistrust everyone. It’s not worth it to me. I see the people who are always looking for the other person’s angle, and I don’t want to be like them. All that you miss out on by not trusting people is not compensated by whatever amount of money and heartache you might save.

I’ve come to suspect, and here’s where I’m very open to correction, that we tend to assume people will act the way that we would in their very same situation. That is, the one who expects the other to try and take an unfair advantage is the one who would take that advantage, given the chance. We naturally exaggerate the negative traits of others, so someone who thinks everyone is a robber isn’t necessarily a robber himself. But he is someone who is willing to promote his interests (or those of his groups) ahead of those of others.

Does any of that make sense? There are verses that seem to urge us to be more “astute” in our dealings with others (Luke 16:8; Matthew 10:16) How trusting should we be? In what ways can we be too trusting?

Deadly mirage

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It came out in a paper in the U.K. last month. I didn’t see much coverage here, but I thought the news to be rather significant. Let me quote a couple of paragraphs from the article:

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

“Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”

How many times will history have to repeat itself before we are convinced? When humans go to war, we don’t have all the facts. The citizens, those called upon to lay down their lives, don’t have all the facts. In this case, even those calling for war didn’t have the correct information.

I continue to marvel that people who complain about putting their tax dollars in the hands of the government seem so willing to put the lives of their sons and daughters in the very same hands. We don’t trust them with our money, but we trust them with our children.

Even when time and time again we find out that what we thought we knew about the reasons for fighting turns out to be a mirage. A deadly mirage.

Wars are fought on lies and deceit. I for one want to have no part of it.

Willingly deceived?

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feathersOK, after a trip to the Pepperdine lectures, I’m back and ready to bounce some more ideas off of you. Before I so rudely interrupted myself by posting some things I had written previously, I was discussing the idea that governments will say and do what they need to in order to prolong their own existence. We would like to think that our government will always be open and honest with us, but experience says that just isn’t so. For example, we remember the righteous indignation with which the Carter administration responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However, it wasn’t until 1998 that former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted (in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur) that the U.S. had baited the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by funding Islamic rebels in that country. [Ironically, Brzezinski was asked at that time about the wisdom of such action. “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?,” he replied. When the interviewer questioned Brzezinski about Islamic fundamentalism representing a world menace, he said, “Nonsense!” That was, of course, three years before 9/11] Was that an isolated episode? Hardly. Nations around the world have done and will do this very thing time and again. And people forgive them. There was a fake commercial on a comedy show back in the 80s which had the tagline “The CIA: You don’t know what we do. You don’t want to know.” That pretty much sums it up for many.

Here’s what concerns me: Christians throw in their lot with these earthly governments based on the information they are given. “God is on our side” is the battle cry of armies everywhere, with Christians taking up arms based on what politicians say and do. Some Christians come to support these governments no matter what. Pragmatism takes precedence over spirituality; what matters is what works, what will keep us safe, what will assure the continuing existence of the kingdom that we support, be it the Roman empire, colonial Spain, or the United States of America.

Dare we abdicate our right to make moral decisions? Will we trust in worldly people to decide whether or not we should use torture? Will we let Congress decide who we are to hate, who we are to kill, who we are to fight, whose nation and way of life we are to destroy? The same people who moan and complain about what the President is doing, about the decisions that Congress makes, about how our government is run, these same people will turn around and urge us to go fight the wars that these politicians choose. We don’t want Obama to spend our money nor make moral decisions about marriage or stem cell research, but we want to give him the right to tell our young people to destroy an Afghan village. (Fighting the very group that we armed and trained in the 1970s… but let’s not go there…)

Somebody help me make sense of this. A high percentage of Christians that write on the Internet have been highly critical of our government’s policies over the last few months. That’s not only acceptable, it’s encouraged by many. But questioning our country’s military policy (made by the same people) is considered unChristian. Huh?

{photo by duchessa, sxc.hu}