On the duty to lie.
When, if ever, do we have a duty to lie?
In the Old Testament, there is the story of the Hebrew midwives, who were being coerced by Pharaoh to do harm - by killing their patients - and they essentially lied to Pharaoh to protect the infants.
Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, “When you help the Hebrew women give birth, observe them on the birthstools. If the child is a son, kill him; but if it is a daughter, let her live.”
The midwives, however, feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had instructed; they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”
The midwives answered Pharaoh, “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before a midwife arrives.”
So God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, He gave them families of their own. Exodus 1:13-21
As I have said before, this story tells us the limit to our obedience to civil authorities. When the authorities tell us to do harm, it is right to resist them; indeed, the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah are actually commended for lying in order to protect the innocent.
So God considered it more important for the Hebrew midwives to resist an evil government that was commanding them to do harm, than to always tell the truth.
Even so, the Hebrew midwives might simply have said, “No,” to Pharaoh’s command, and then lost their jobs and most likely lost their lives as well. Then I suppose, Pharaoh would simply have found some new Hebrew midwives to replace them, who would toe the party line. I believe that in the circumstances they made the best decision.
And this situation is not strange to us. Indeed, I know an Obstetrician who did indeed say “No” to the hospital last year and lost her job because of it - she was refusing to take the vaccine - her boss said to her, “Yes, but what are you telling your patients?” She said, “I’m only telling patients if they ask there’s not enough long term safety data” - her boss said, “You have to tell them its safe” - and claimed there was data to this effect.
So she asked for him to send her the data and studies proving this - he emailed her a government page that said “the vaccines are safe and effective” at the top - with a disclaimer at bottom - “we reserve the right to change our conclusions at any time.”
So then she got fired from her job. She refused to lie, out of a duty to her patients, and now she is still not working as a Doctor.
She is the only kind of Doctor you and I will trust now. These are the kinds of Doctors and Nurses, when this part of history is all over, who should be put in charge of everything, hospitals and surgeries and health departments - because they are the Doctors who have enough integrity and honesty to lose their livelihood, rather than betray the Hippocratic Oath.
In the meanwhile, journalists and Doctors both are lying in order to keep their jobs, scientists are lying in order to keep their grants coming, even the best and most objective of these scientists now have to couch contrary conclusions in very careful language in order to avoid the politically correct brigade’s cancelling, even in the top medical journals.
Why do people have so little courage? I suppose I don’t blame them, though, in the present circumstances.
And I don’t feel so bad about the time I once lied to protect my job, something I’m not proud of, but I did it, and repented of it, and thankfully did not benefit from it anyway, because my boss at the time found out. He was not a generous boss or a forgiving one, and in the end, I was much better off without that job.
But the worst part of all of this is those I will call the righteous liars, who are really the worst kind of hypocrite. For there are also people who are lying because they feel they have a duty to lie, not in order to protect someone or even to protect themselves, but because they are trying to manipulate people into ‘doing the right thing’. That is why I call them righteous, but these ‘righteous’ people are not the people Jesus the great Physician came for:
When Jesus heard it, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” Mark 2:17
This whole peer review disaster in science that is really at the base of it a crisis in honesty started with Climate Science, in 2009-2010 and earlier, but has infected medicine now and politics and journalism too, and the worst depths of this is caused by an ideology or belief that sees lying as the right thing to do under certain circumstances – a Climate Change believer who thinks the earth is doomed because of increasing CO2 today may well believe he ought to lie about the evidence, exaggerating it, in order to manipulate people into changing their ways. A person who supports a particular political party might feel a duty to be dishonest, printing ballots and stuffing ballot boxes, and they may feel that they have a duty to do this, because their party are the righteous ones who deserve to be in power.
A Christian might well do the same thing: many church authorities lied about child abuse in the past to protect the reputation of the church.
These people remind me of the Jesuits, who in the days of the Spanish conquest, had worked out in scrupulous detail that they could keep their consciences clean whilst lying in this way: if you say one thing, and the person listening believes you said something else, then it’s not a lie, even if you knew that was what they would think when you said what you said and didn’t correct their misunderstanding. Of course that is a lie; the Climate Change believer who lies about the evidence might not be that smart, or that devious, but the similarity exists in that both the Jesuit and the Climate Change believer and the true party believer and the church official thought that they could lie and be in the right at the same time. They believed they had a duty to lie, because they believed they were the righteous ones.
And there is no tyrant as dreadful to contemplate as the tyrants who lie, murder, and torture, out of a sense of religious duty. Is it too much to call Climate Change believers, religious? Their zeal has that religious quality.
I heard there were hospitals where they targeted unvaccinated people to be put on ventilators and given Remdesvir, knowing it would kill them. Is this possible? I hope not. I hope this is just an unfounded rumour.
But if it did happen it wouldn’t be the first time in history that the ideologues have crossed even that line.
Really such an excellent piece. Much respect.