Father, what does lying mean?

The title of the post that ended the series on Jill Lepore's book was this: Lying is as American as apple pie.

Of course, there is nothing exceptional about lying in America.  Everybody lies.  It is universal.  In the modern world, businesses are experts at lying.  How many years has it been since the Bhopal tragedy, for instance, and how truthful has the criminal business been?  Or, how truthful has the Indian government been?

Businesses routinely lie. Which is why we often joke, because there is nothing else that we can really do, that "business ethics" is an oxymoron!  A short piece at Harvard Business Review begins like this:

Many of the corporate scandals in the past several years — think Volkswagen or Wells Fargo — have been cases of wide-scale dishonesty. It’s hard to fathom how lying and deceit permeated these organizations.

Wait a second, aren't lying and deceit important and fundamental values in money-making?!

At least these businesses do not pretend to be moral compasses that point to people the direction to heaven and hell.  Lying, as we have always known, is very much a part of the culture of institutionalized religions too.  As if the Roman Catholic church has not messed up with people's lives enough and then lying about every crime that they have been involved with, the latest--as shocking as it is--continues along the path of lying and deceit that the institution has always done:

[The] Vatican has confirmed, apparently for the first time, that its department overseeing the world’s priests has general guidelines for what to do when clerics break celibacy vows and father children.
“I can confirm that these guidelines exist,” the Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti wrote in response to a query from The New York Times. “It is an internal document.”

Think about this: The Vatican has developed procedures on what to do, what to say, whenever one of its priests end up fathering children.  And these procedures are to ensure that the word does not get out.  Systematic lying and deceit are fundamental values in religion too!

The Vatican even has a specific phrase to refer to the children of priests: "children of the ordained."  And, of course, there is no "official" estimate of the numbers of "children of the ordained."

The children are sometimes the result of affairs involving priests and laywomen or nuns — others of abuse or rape. There are some, exceedingly rare, high-profile cases, but the overwhelming majority remain out of the public eye.

Just awful! 

Keep this, too, in mind when the Pope or any of his underlings chastize the business world for not working for the greater good.  Nor should you ever be fooled by any business that pretends that it never does anything evil.  And, don't get me started about politicians and governments.

Bloody liars they mostly are!