I Wasn't Expecting To Read Such Good News About A Bad Thing When I Turned On The Computer - This Should Be Required Reading

I DECIDED TO post this before I'd gotten two paragraphs in, it goes along with the idea I bang on about endlessly and will until I die, that there is a complete and total difference between the good of the truth and the evils of lying, lying knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally and that when it is intentional it is uniformly to do wrong, usually to do evil.    Though it doesn't go as far as I do and admit that, despite what the Supreme Court holds because "The First Amendment," there is no right to lie, it is either a wrong done through negligence, which should be required to be corrected or by intent which should be required to be corrected and, especially in the mass media, punished.

How bad should you feel if you share a Facebook post or tweet that turns out to be untrue?

Well, you could listen to the advice of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Or you could listen to a few other innovators with impressive numbers of followers:

"I tell you," said Jesus, according to the Gospel of Matthew, "on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak." 

"Does anything topple people headlong into Hellfire, more than the harvests of their tongues?" asked Muhammad.

The Buddha emphasized the importance of "right speech," defined as "abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter."

The great religious traditions do not stop at the simple Sunday-school warning against lying. They dive deep into our unconscious motivations, call out our intellectual laziness and suggest that we have an affirmative moral obligation to be fact-checkers.

In our internet age, this ancient wisdom is urgently relevant. The spread of misinformation is one of the most serious problems our society faces. Misinformation advances bad medical information and more mortality; it undermines democracy, turns people against one another and makes it harder for people to discern the truth. . . 

 

Prompted by his anguish over the spread of misinformation, Francis recently created a new version of the famous prayer of St. Francis:

    Lord, make us instruments of your peace.
    Help us to recognize the evil latent in a communication that does not build communion.
    Help us to remove the venom from our judgments.
    Help us to speak about others as our brothers and sisters.
    You are faithful and trustworthy; may our words be seeds of goodness for the world:
    where there is shouting, let us practice listening;
    where there is confusion, let us inspire harmony;
    where there is ambiguity, let us bring clarity;
    where there is exclusion, let us offer solidarity;
    where there is sensationalism, let us use sobriety;
    where there is superficiality, let us raise real questions;
    where there is prejudice, let us awaken trust;
    where there is hostility, let us bring respect;
    where there is falsehood, let us bring truth.
    Amen.

To which I'd add, wise-up the lawyers and judges and "justices" the politicians and "journalists" and scribbling classes to the fact that to pretend that there are any rights attached to lying, that pretending that there is a right to lie damages not only the right to tell the truth and that people have the right to be told the truth and to have a belief in it be effective enough to bring about good will, equality, justice and the possibility of us saving enough of the biosphere so that life on Earth might survive this age of "enlightenment" lying.