Why is Lying Bad?

Why is lying bad for you?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that lying is good, and I'm not asking why it is bad to lie. I know - and you know - that lying creates mistrust, it is unloving, and it breaks the relationships between people.

But, if I lie to help myself out of a bad situation, or to make something easier (for me or someone else), or whatever other reason we might use to justify lying - why is it bad for me?

Buechner says that nothing marks us as human as much as speech. Think how hard it is to learn to speak a language fluently. We take it for granted, but speech is incredibly complicated and is a gift that we have to enable us to communicate with each other. With speech we can build people up, we can express our love for them, we can teach, entertain, and connect through language - and so much more than I'm listing. Our speech helps to make us human - it is an incredible gift.

Think about the post I used yesterday. When we sin, we dehumanize ourselves. When we lie, we are using this incredible gift in a way that eats away at our humanity. You've seen it, and so have I. Tell one lie, and it is easier to tell another. Each lie degrades the integrity of our speech - and makes us less than we were before. Buechner says, "What makes lying an evil is less that the world is mischievously deceived by it than that we are sorely dehumanized by it."