Dante teaches that those who intentionally bear false witness for personal gain go to places of increasing pain. Pain increases are proportional to the harm they’ve done, which increases with the complexity of the fraud they perpetuate. Catholic fundamentalists try to quantify the process.
We can classify a few lies of which we are made aware. A colossal lie: “Tsunamis are caused by global warming”. This is a lie so big that it has little credibility to anyone but the most fanatic. But, it makes smaller, related lies (islands are disappearing beneath the sea, coastal wetlands will be uninhabitable in a few years, polar bears are disappearing, cities will drown, penguins are being blinded by the ozone hole) seem more reasonable in comparison.
So, big, fantastic lies are as necessary to the other side as the garden variety, meat and potatoes lies. Punishments are about the same, though the teller of the biggest whopper has sacrificed more imagination to the other side, and will reap the appropriate reward.
It takes very few direct liars to spread a lie. First, of course, the Lie Committee reviews lies and clears them for dissemination. A few years ago, the Lie Committee put forth the Global Freezing Lie.
They spread it around, but only half-heartedly because there wasn’t much money in it. It was quickly replaced by the Global Warming Lie. As Stalin showed by suddenly signing the non-aggression pact with Hitler, good liars have to be so flexible they can make a complete reversal the minute they are told of the new course. Just as many weak liars (read: people with a tendency toward truth) left the Communist Party after Stalin’s stunning reversal, so many left the Environmental Movement after their stunning reversal from Global Freezing to Global Warming.
When Lie Committee saw how much they made with the ozone fraud (scroll up to the column for January 3, 2006), Global Warming looked like the biggest bonanza. The whole lot of them, from the Lie Committee to Media Twits to legislators and teachers of environment claptrap, obediently and immediately said that everything they’d said before was a lie and that the new lie was now the truth.
The pseudo-intelligensia, many left over from International Communism, spread the new lie through their same friends and institutions in media, public education, government, non-government orgs, friendly businesses and all their many allies in all over the world.
The originator of the “The ozone hole is bad, it is caused by freon, let’s tax and regulate freon and make billions” lie is, for the sake of argument, in the Ninth Circle. Those involved with the Lie Committee go there, too, along with those who do what they call “research”. A recent example is the “hockey stick”, which “proved global warming”, but only by not telling the whole truth. The ones who profit from it are in the lower part of the Eighth Circle.
Lower on the totem pole of liars, and ending up in less painful portions of Hades, are a lie’s pass-it-onners and believers. The ones who pass on the lie are in Circle Seven. Those who only believe the lie, even thought all they did was believe, are in the one of the upper circles, but, still in Hades.
Why are they condemned for merely believing? They were given the intelligence to see through the lie, but were too lazy or cowardly to do so. Like every human being, they were given enough intelligence to find truth (God would never give anyone too little ability to be saved) but chose not to use it.
