Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness!

I was reading a comment on a Christian blog called The Church Mouse, which asked why the author had not discovered any comments by blogging vicars about the affair that has been at the top of the news for the last few days - ie the attempts to smear Conservative MPs by one of Gordon Brown's special advisers. I thought about this, and wondered why I had not felt moved to comment on this story.

I think that the main reason is, appalled as I am by the fact that anyone should go out of their way to spread unpleasant lies about others, it does concern me that this story has driven so much else off the front pages. There are so many people suffering around the world, whom we forget about if they are not in our news, that I feel that this issue is getting more than its fair share of air time. Yes, it is of public interest and should not be "hushed up", but I do feel that I have heard more than I could ever have wished to about this subject over last few days.

I know that it is unfashionable to quote the Ten Commandments, but they do sum up the whole debate in six words. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" and, as I once saw on a T-shirt, God said "What part of 'THOU SHALT NOT' do you not understand?" This commandment is sometimes explained as "You should not lie"; but it is not about fibbing, it is about deliberately and maliciously saying something that is untrue about another person. I believe I am right in saying that, under the ancient Jewish law, a person who made an accusation which was proved to be false would incur the penalty intended for their victim - up to and including stoning to death. This recognised how important it was not to bear false witness, and the damage that unfounded allegations could cause to society as well as the individual.

In planning to put scurrilous reports about individuals on a web-site, the perpetrator's aim was to damage those people, and by extension their political party, and there is justice in the fact that it is his job, reputation and party that have suffered what he intended for others. I doubt that it occurred to him that what he was doing would also damage society itself, yet that is what it has done. Not only by keeping more important issues out of the news, but by undermining our political system. For all its faults, we do have one of the few regimes in the world that I would wish live under, and I suspect that if most people are honest they will say the same. We damage that at all our peril!