In soft-totalitarianism, a sense of well-being, pleasure, and safety are the highest goods. Truth does not rank among them.
— Philip Rief, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud
John Tures’ recent article in the Daily Post about loss of religious faith concludes with the a hope that we be “ …a force for solutions to what ails society, and what our belief systems encourage us to do …”
…what Abraham Lincoln called, “the better angels of our nature.”
Unfortunately it appears the “better angels” of “our belief system”, that derive from the moral teachings of our religious heritage, seemingly are being replaced by political hyper-partisanship — as illustrated in another Daily Post article, by Richard Donnelly. He relates an encounter at a non-political social function in which other guests demanded he identify his political affiliation and condemn Republicans.
Donnelly accurately describes his inquisitors’ attitudes as “Orwellian”. They clearly believe their political opponents are “what ails society”.
Tures and Donnelly are talking about the same problem — but from different perspectives. Donnelly describes a symptom (hyper-partisan politics), whereas Tures explores a possible cause (loss of faith). Accepting both premises as valid, I offer a different point of view — melding their themes with the religious roots of our legal system.
The Ten Commandments (the basis of Mosaic law, and among the foundations of ours) were believed by the Israelites to have been pronounced by their God directly to the prophet Moses. One of those Commandments is the admonition “Thou shalt not bear false witness”… or words to that effect, depending on the translation from the ancient text.
But whichever translation, the point is that lying is a sin against their God. In our law, this infraction is referred to by the Roman legal doctrine as malum in se (evil in itself) — reflecting a merging of the concepts of ancient cultures into our legal system.
Among cultures with religious beliefs in an afterlife — in addition to whatever sanctions a person caught lying might suffer during mortal life from temporal authorities — a liar will also (presumably) face divine retribution in the afterlife. The idea that lying under oath will earn you eternal damnation runs through many cultural religious and legal traditions.
For example, in his epic history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon describes the pagan (polytheistic) Roman attitude to lying by witnesses, “The crime of perjury is most assuredly punished by the avenging gods.” (Vol I, Chap II).
Our legal term for lying under oath — perjury — derives from the Latin perjure which at the time referred to causing harm through false words. That, and other doctrines of Roman and Mosaic law, were passed down to us through the Church after Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity.
‘The Inferno’, the first part the 14th Century Christian narrative poem The Divine Comedy, describes various levels of hell as the eternal destination for miscreants in life. The worst place was reserved for “oath breakers”.
The point was to literally put the fear of God behind the duty to live up to an oath.
Jesus (a Jew), whom Christians believe to be their God’s prophet, sometimes referred to the principles espoused in the Commandments in his teachings.
The prophet of another religion that arose from the same region did so as well.
The prophet of Islam said their God condemned lying as well. Mohammed wrote, “Truthfulness leads to righteousness, and righteousness leads to Paradise. And a man keeps on striving to tell the truth until he is recorded with Allah as very truthful. Lying leads to wickedness, and wickedness leads to the Hellfire, and a man may keep on telling lies until he is recorded with Allah as a grave liar.”
Note, the reference to ‘hell’ as the ultimate fate of liars.
In a religion older than Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (and from which all three can trace common precepts) lying (deceit) was a sin against God. Followers of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism, worshiped Auramazda (the sun god). Their faith was based on the teachings of that God’s prophet, Zarathustra (Zoraster). The basic tenet of that religion was a clear dichotomy between good and evil — ‘Asha’ and ‘Drug’ — the latter of which includes ‘deceit’.
Zoroastrianism can trace some of its roots to the earlier Indian belief in ‘Rita’ — the moral law of the universe — described in the ancient sacred scripts (Vedas). ‘Rita’ includes the original concepts of dharma (duty), and karma (the accumulated effects of good and bad acts during life). The benefits (or consequences) of adherence (or not) to the duty of honesty would follow you beyond the grave.
Our modern word ‘testimony’ is derived from both the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages. In both, it had a religious connotation about the telling of truth.
In our current legal system, any witness who testifies must first openly profess a commitment to be truthful. I’ve read different theories about the origin of that practice. One claims it began in English Courts in the 17th century, while others claim the Romans — and before them the Greeks — required a pledge to the gods to be truthful before testifying in a trial.
Whichever is accurate, the idea of requiring a person giving evidence in a legal proceeding to first take an oath to a high moral standard, emerged to encourage honest testimony. The oath, theoretically, exposed the witness to eternal condemnation in the afterlife that would outweigh any relatively short-term benefit from lying in this life.
For most of human history the theory worked fairly well. The great majority of people believed in an afterlife where one would spend eternity in some version of either ‘heaven’ or ‘hell’ depending on how they behaved on mortal life.
But there is a basic flaw with that theory.
It only works if the oath taker has faith that there is an afterlife in which there will be ultimate judgment after death by a supreme being or other moral force.
But what is the value of such an oath to a non-believer?
Part Two will explore the societal consequences of lack of belief in an afterlife as it relates to telling the truth in this one.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.