SIN OF DISHONESTY
The “credibility gap” that once alienated the public from people in high places now seems to separate us from one another in all walks of life. Americans lie on their income tax return to the tune of millions of dollars a year. Doctors fake reports in order to profit from Medicare patients. Prize athletes at great universities are kept eligible for competition through bogus credits and forged transcripts of academic records. Children soon acquire the cynical assumption that lying is the normal tack for TV advertisers. In the words of a Time magazine essay, ours is “a huckstering, show-bizzy world, jangling with hype, hullabaloo, and hooey, bull, baloney, and bamboozlement.” After a while, people tend to expect not to hear the truth anymore; in 1976, a national poll showed that 69 percent of Americans believed that the country’s leaders had, over the last decade, consistently lied to the people.” (Cambridge Survey Research) From Lewis Smedes, Mere Morality: What God Expects From…
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