Definition: the quality of seeming true or of having the appearance of being real.[1]
If you repeat a lie often enough eventually people will begin to believe it.
Attributed to Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)
A good liar will tell you 90% of the truth and the other 10% will be a lie.
(anon)
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)
There are a lot of common sayings that we use/hear all the time. They may or may not be true and that depends on the context, but at best, they are misleading and at worst just plain wrong. Here is a list of some of them.
- When God closes a door somewhere He opens a window.
- Assumes that God wants you to do something or go somewhere. He may not want you anywhere near what you have planned.
- If He opens anything it will be a door, not a window.
- What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
- Sometimes a bad experience can ruin a person’s life which he is never able to recover from.
- Guns kill people
- People kill people.
- Knives kill people too as do other methods.
- “No good deed goes unpunished.”
- Runs directly counter to Bible teaching.
- There is no absolute truth.
- Ask them if that is absolutely true.
- If you believe in yourself nothing is impossible (paraphrase). – seen on a poster at the VA medical center I go to.
- Jer 17:5 – Do they really think they have that much control of their lives, and others about them?
- “There are no dumb questions.”
- If they already know the answer. However, I could ask an atheist a question that I already know the answer to, the purpose being to get him/her to think about something they said. So-called “fake questions” or meaningless ones.‘Gotcha’ questions.
- Whether or not I talk to the animal (happens a lot).
- “The customer is always right.”
- Sometimes they are just rude and obnoxious which is not right.
- They may ask/demand a refund on a product that’s already been used.
- Hindsight is always 20/20.
- Just not true. We will never know everything about the situation; there may have been some or many things we missed or overlooked.
- “Never say never”
- This statement denies itself by not meeting its own standard.
- “Anything goes”
- In the long run, not really. Let’s say a man cheats on his wife. This is going to have several long-term effects.
- “Doing the same thing over and over defines insanity”
- Trying to start your car more than once and it working would disprove this one.
- The old ‘nature vs nurture’ debate. ((Saad, 2021, pg.24)[2]
- Actually, it’s both – this then is a false dichotomy.
There is a special set of sayings that fit the definition of ‘self-defeating’ because they don’t meet their own standards. An example would be ‘only science can tell us the truth’. This one is self-defeating because it is not a scientific statement.[3]
Let us train our thinking to spot these false and misleading sayings.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/verisimilitude
[2] Saad, G. (2021). The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Regnery Publishing.
[3] Geisler, N. L., & Turek, F. (2004). I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. Crossway Bibles. See Chapter 1 Can We Hande the Truth?
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