Lying Liars
One of the things that I do to pass the time is play poker. I play it with friends, I play it on my computer and on my wii, and I play it with strangers in casinos. I was playing in a casino one time when I mentioned what me hand was after I’d folded. I’m a very honest person generally, so even though I understand the truth of what they were saying, it still hurt me a little to be told by the other players that they didn’t believe what I’d said, just because I was a poker player. I was playing poker, so that, ipso facto, made me a liar and therefore what I had said was probably a lie. This is prejudice, of course, but it’s prejudice with logic behind it.
In a lot of ways, though, the proper generalization isn’t, “I’m a poker player, so I have a high probability of lying,” but rather, “I’m a human, so I have a high probability of lying.” Given that, I asked God, why is it that so many people accept what others have said about God? I mean, if you’ve got something like God, for which there is no actual evidence other than what people have said, and particularly where the things that are claimed (on God’s behalf) by these “people in the know” are so often contradictory, why would you pick one group’s beliefs and take them to be true, rather than just assume that they’re all liars and ignore them?
God didn’t actually disagree with me. He just told me that he was often amazed that so many people do believe in him. And then he went on to point out that all religions are based, at their core, on belief in the face of no evidence and that in the middle of the word “believe” is the word “lie.” He assured me that this is not an accident.
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