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Once a person steps out of the box and takes a look at religion from the outside, the extent of deception is breath-taking.

Item: I was listening to a religious radio broadcast in the car, a call-in show, when I heard the preacher host tell a caller to lie. Hearing this, so directly and blatantly, was like an epiphany of sorts, waking me up to how often this happens in religion. The young caller asked how he could inform his parents that he’d done drugs. He was over it now, but felt he should share his past with them. His biggest concern was over having insulted his parents’ trust by waiting so long to tell them.

The preacher suggested he start by explaining the reason he hadn’t already told them before. “Tell them you were afraid of losing their love,” he suggested.

The caller immediately burst out, “Oh no! They would never stop loving me, that much I know!”

The preacher then said, and this is verbatim, because I curbed the car and wrote it down: “Oh, but see, that’s what you tell them. You want to prepare them for why you didn’t share this with them earlier.”

Sadly this type of  license to say anything at all in support of the agenda seems to be the rule, not the exception. Little truths be damned, if they don’t support what’s considered to be the greater truth. Example’s are plentiful.

Item: SDA preacher Lonnie Melashenko made a reference to people thinking the earth was flat, until the 15th century: “Had the people back then taken the Bible seriously ...they would have seen that God said the earth was round!” He quoted Isaiah 40:22: “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth...”

Thus, in order to make the Bible sound prophetic, Melashenko implied the Bible revealed the real nature of the earth—not flat but a sphere. Yet the Bible only seemed to call the earth a circle (not a sphere), and a circle can indeed be flat, like a dish or CD. Surely Melashenko and all other biblical scholars are aware of numerous other biblical texts which demonstrate the opposite—that Bible writers thought the sun revolved around a flat earth, rather than a spherical earth revolving around the sun. They spoke of the earth as having four corners. Is this preacher being honest in his effort to prove the Bible’s supernatural origins when he claims the Bible understood the world wasn’t flat? No. But what’s the need for a meticulous dedication to truth, the thinking seems to be, if the little ways we misconstrue or deceive are in service to a bigger truth?

Item: Seems the more religious people are, the more license they accord themselves to pass off utter rubbish as truth. My article Agatha’s Trash illustrates the depths of dishonesty to which some will go.

Item: Fundamentalists typically refer to those who think the government should stay out of ethical decisions relating to early pregnancy as “pro abortion,” even when they know the issue for many on the other side is not abortion, but government intrusion. Note carefully that I’m not discussing (at this point) the issue of abortion, nor whether government should or shouldn’t be involved in this; my point here is simply the dishonesty of those who deliberately misrepresent the other side as being “pro abortion.” Somehow this little dishonesty is okay if it helps the other side look bad, thus serving what is perceived as a higher purpose.

Item: Religious people have managed to have the government refuse funding for schools that teach comprehensive sex education (as opposed to abstinence only). As with all of the issues I cover on this page, my point is not the position itself, but the dishonesty with which it is advocated. In this case, dishonesty is rampant in the literature and websites of many religious outfits where they misrepresent the truth about the effectiveness of condoms, as well as the efficacy of their abstinence-only programs. The USA has the highest rate of teen pregnancy and STDs in the Western world, even as it alone spends billions on these programs which have been unequivocally proven not to work. Yet Christians, even when they know the real truth, will claim the programs work and condoms don’t. The truth is just the opposite: abstinence-only programs don’t work, and condoms do. Of all the people we might expect to be meticulously dedicated to truth, shouldn’t it be those who claim to be Christ-like? These deceptions are as deliberate as they are deadly. What is the point of religion, if honesty is not cherished and practiced?

Item: Here’s another typical example of how truth isn’t important to many religious people, if lying serves a preferred agenda. No text in the Bible hints of any understanding of sexual orientation. Only recently did science discover and acknowledge that people simply grow up, through no choice of their own, with an orientation toward sex that is usually one thing, but sometimes another. Until recently, it was assumed (at least by straight people) that anyone who engaged in same-gender sexual activity was just an ordinary heterosexual who fell to some perverse, hedonistic temptation to experiment in animalistic pleasures. Several biblical texts do mention specific sexual acts between same-gendered persons as an “abomination” before God, but none addresses the then-unknown concept of sexual orientation. Thus, one may accurately say the Bible condemns certain homosexual activities, but one cannot say the Bible condemns or even addresses “homosexuality.” To call “homosexuality” a sin would be to condemn a person simply for who he is, rather than for what he does—even if he is celibate.

Yet many preachers continue to claim the Bible condemns “homosexuality” and “homosexuals” rather than only certain behaviors—even when they are perfectly aware of the distinction! Who can be bothered by the technicalities of truth, the thinking seems to go, if ignoring the truth benefits a perceived greater truth? And never mind that people are being hurt by it. It’s like when the White Estate blatantly told me it didn’t matter whether EGW never mentioned homosexuality in connection with Sodom, they can still falsely imply she made the connection because, after all, everybody knows “Sodom” means homosexuality anyway. Of course the only reason people connect Sodom to homosexuality in the first place is precisely because preachers and the White Estate continue to make the unfounded connection. The fact that people’s lives are ruined over this failure of honesty seems not to matter to them.

I know of no other profession or endeavor in which such looseness with the truth is routinely practiced and accepted as a given. (Perhaps politics.)

Item: I recently watched a series of religious video programs on healthful living. They were produced by a church that is big on vegetarianism and prohibits smoking and drinking. That agenda came through loud and clear in the videos, at the expense of the whole truth—and it left people in a more dangerous position because of it. For example, plates of various kinds of meat entrees were pictured—bacon, beef, chicken, etc. The narration went something like this: “Many people think this chicken dish isn’t as bad for you as this plate of bacon, but it is!” The narrator didn’t bother mentioning that the white meat of chicken is far less harmful than bacon and red meats. ...Or that removing the skin from the darker chicken meat makes it much less harmful. This dangerous misinformation resulted from a hidden agenda. If, as viewers had a right to expect, the agenda had been to explain how to live a longer, healthier life, then a case might have been made for complete vegetarianism while also giving the life-saving information about the difference between lean meats and the far more dangerous meats.

In just about every video I watched in this series, significant parts of the whole truth were withheld. Whole milk was pictured and condemned without so much as a hint that fat-free milk could be used as a much healthier alternative. A dish of baked potatoes was unfavorably compared with unhealthy foods without a hint that it was the loading on of butter and sauces (pictured in the example) that made that dish relatively detrimental. Have your potatoes plain or with a different sauce, and the difference would be enormous.

Other deceptions had to do with portions. Maybe a platter of various fruits would have the same nutritional value of an energy bar—but who’s going to have a large platter of fruit for a meal? And who would pack it in a lunch box?

None of these half-truths and deceptions would occur if the chief intent was the one implied, to help people live healthier, rather than to further the hidden agenda of steering people into the Christian denomination that produced the series, and to its dietary prescriptions.

I started this page of examples of religious deceit as a link from my description of how some people (such as the volunteers I worked with on secular missions) seem far more genuine than others, when not burdened with the baggage of religion. I know those people would be far less inclined to employ these kinds of deceptions because they don’t have the religious agenda that motivate them.

Years ago I made a statement that I’ve repeated over time. I said that if I were forced at gunpoint to choose between living the rest of my life in a community of 1,000 Christians, or 1,000 atheists, I’d choose the atheists in a heartbeat. Because I’d trust them more. Saying anything that comes to mind in the interest of a religious agenda isn’t like breathing for them. They wouldn’t hurt people with religion because, obviously, non-believers don’t have religion as a basis for doing that.

I’ve been told not to judge a religion by its bad apples. But at some point you have to say “religion is as religion does.” And doesn’t the Bible say “by their fruits shall you know them”? At what point, in a sea of disingenuousness, does one conclude he’s seen enough to make a reasonable judgment? At what point does one rightly begin to question the authenticity of a religion and its proprietary deity, given this much failure to live up to its claims?

Some will be quick to defend, by reminding me of all the good that churches have done, or by suggesting that the joy and comfort religion has brought to countless millions outweighs the harm. To me, that’s like defending cars that pollute, over cars that don’t, by bragging about the fact that they do run.

I don’t much like my own negative tone on this page, but I think the truth should be acknowledged. Too often, the very people who are religiously judgmental toward others seem to think the rule of honesty doesn’t apply to them. What does that say about the authenticity of the religion?