I have posted numerous times about the vice of lying. In every culture and religion of which I am aware, liars and lies are despised.
Yet, every culture and religion are also FILLED with lies and liars. I have been lied to countless times that I know about and countless more times of which I am unaware. It is very disturbing, to say the least. Dovid Hamelech said אני אמרתי בחפזי כל האדם כוזב - I said in my haste that all men are false. People lie.
Every single religion [except for one - ours:-)] is predicated upon lies. Billions of people are living based on lies.
It is sad.
We only accept our tradition and every second of our lives are governed by it's laws and beliefs because we believe that we weren't lied to. So many people don't believe because they just assume that it is another lie that they were told.
The problem with assuming that EVERYTHING is a lie is that then we should doubt that our parents are really our parents. Maybe they lied to us and we were really adopted? Then society crumbles because we lose all respect for parents - because we don't know who they are. [Rav Kook made this point in his מורה לנבוכי הזמן].
So we MUST trust sometimes. We trust that we weren't lied to and Hashem really gave the Torah at Har Sinai. There are many reasons for this trust. One of the MANY, is that if we don't trust, we are left with NOTHING. No values, no morals and we just turn into animals with two legs and a Facebook account. People who have no G-d are just that. Eat, drink, defacate, copulate. Animals. We NEED our tradition. [Again - there are amny other reasons we trust in the veracity of our tradition but not for here. We have discussed and written about this on many occassions]. We trust that our parents are really our parents. We trust that when we order something over the Internet it will be sent to our home - otherwise we can't purchase things this way. We trust that people we do business with won't rob us blind - otherwise we can't do business.
Yet, after all is said and done we remain wary of people and their falsehoods. All we can do to combat all of this falsehood is to try to be true to our word and not say things that aren't true.
