A World Flooded With Perjury

The Words found in your majority-text King James Bible are the perfect Words of God. They are true in the face of the world's vaunted contradictions. They are true when in instances they appear so "obviously" false. They are true and proven true in more ways than can be numbered. The Words of God are pure and they have been thoroughly tried. They will sustain the weight of all your needs. All of its detractors have been found foolish and so very short sighted. God's Word has the answers to all of life's questions. Embrace it with Godly fear. If you have yet to surrender your life to the Jesus Christ of the Word, do it today and today will surely be the best day of your life. Click on to "Further With Jesus" before you go any further. NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Exodus 23:1:

Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness.

GOD SAID, Deuteronomy 19:16-20:

16 If a false witness rise up against any man to testify against him that which is wrong;

17 Then both the men, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and the judges, which shall be in those days;

18 And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother;

19 Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you.

20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.

MAN SAID: How dare these uneducated, easily-led Bible thumpers try to foist their old, archaic morality on me! Who are they to tell me "thou shalt not lie" or "commit adultery?" Everyone lies and a big percentage of the world commits adultery. How dare they!

Now THE RECORD: God's Word gives specific commandment concerning a particular issue, and man either consistently ignores or flatly rejects it. The terrible negative effect of man's disobedience is just more proof that the supernatural God authored the Scriptures. The cost of disobedience is colossal and eternal. Galatians 6:7:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

The subject matter of this feature focuses on fraud and perjury. The enormous cost to humanity is staggering. The following excerpt is from a 1999 article by R. Weissman titled, "Corporate Perjury and Obstruction of Justice:"

Harvard University's Malcolm Sparrow estimates that health care fraud alone costs the nation anywhere from $100 billion to $400 billion a year—10 to 40 percent of the $1 trillion a year we spend on health care. Most of this is corporate fraud—corporations ripping off the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The savings and loan scandal, what former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called "the biggest white-collar swindle in history," cost the nation anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion. [End of quote]

Other frauds listed in the article include $40 billion a year in auto repair fraud and $15 billion a year in securities fraud; the list continues, ending with street crime and burglary, which posts 3.8 billion annually.

Lying is an attribute of human nature resulting from the Edenic transaction. Great-grandmother Eve, in an act of unbelief, embraced a lie. The result was instant spiritual death and eventual physical death. Eve no longer possessed the perfect, sinless life source to pass on to her children. Consequently, we were all spiritually stillborn. The Scriptures speak of man prior to salvation in Ephesians 2:1:

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins:

The human carnal nature is fruit of the rebellion of Satan, Adam, and Eve against the authority of God's Word. Jesus speaks of those who reject truth in John 8:44:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

Lying is a matter of kinship. It just comes naturally: like father, like son; like mother, like daughter.

Perjury is lying under oath. The following brief excerpt is from the Yale Law Journal: "Witness perjury, suborned or spontaneous, is endemic...so frequent in criminal cases that parties on both sides expect that witnesses will lie to the extent they cannot be debunked by the opposition." [End of quote]

"Endemic" was the word used in the Yale Law Journal: "Witness perjury...is endemic." It means "peculiar to a people or nation." Perjury is a carnal trait—it's endemic to the unregenerated.

Lying is endemic. The following excerpts are from a 2003 article in the New York Times titled "I.R.S. to Ask Working Poor for Proof on Tax Credits:"

The Internal Revenue Service is planning to ask more than four million of the working poor who now claim a special tax credit to provide the most exhaustive proof of eligibility ever demanded of any class of taxpayers. The I.R.S., trying to prevent errors and cheating, says it needs greater proof of eligibility months before people claim the credit on their tax returns because its efforts to find errors through audits after the fact have not worked. Treasury officials estimate that $6.5 billion to $10 billion is lost to improper payments each year.

Again, the article reports:

The I.R.S.'s most recent attempt to measure tax cheating—based on 1988 data and published in 1992—showed that the biggest tax dodgers by far were people running their own businesses. They cost the Treasury about $38 billion in lost 1992 taxes by failing to report all their income. [End of quote]

In a 1998 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Alan Dershowitz had this to say:

On the basis of my academic and professional experience, I believe that no felony is committed more frequently in this country than the genre of perjury and false statements. Perjury during civil depositions and trials is so endemic that a respected appellate judge once observed that "experienced lawyers say that, in large cities, scarcely a trial occurs in which some witness does not lie." He quoted a wag to the effect that cases often are decided "according to the preponderance of perjury." Filing false tax returns and other documents under pains and penalties of perjury is so rampant that everyone acknowledges that only a tiny fraction of offenders can be prosecuted. Making false statements to a law enforcement official is so commonplace that the Justice Department guidelines provide for prosecution of only some categories of this daily crime. Perjury at criminal trials is so common that whenever a defendant testifies and is found guilty, he has presumptively committed perjury. Police perjury in criminal cases—particularly in the context of searches and other exclusionary rule issues—is so pervasive that the former police chief of San Jose and Kansas City has estimated that "hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests" alone.  [End of quote]

Note the word endemic again. Also note that perjury is not only pervasive amongst the criminals. It's Adamic nature.

Concerning lying law enforcement personnel, Dershowitz continued:

The epidemic is conceded even among the highest ranks of law enforcement. For example, William F. Bratton, who has headed the police departments of New York City and Boston, has confirmed that "testilying" is a "real problem that needs to be addressed." He also placed some of the responsibility squarely at the feet of prosecutors: When a prosecutor is really determined to win, the trial prep procedure may skirt along the edge of coercing or leading the police witness. In this way, some impressionable young cops learn to tailor their testimony to the requirements of the law. Many judges who listen to or review police testimony on a regular basis privately agree with Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who publicly stated: "It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers," and that the reason for it is that "the exclusionary rule . . . sets up a great incentive for . . . police to lie to avoid letting someone they think is guilty, or they know is guilty, go free." Or, as Judge Irving Younger explained, "Every lawyer who practices in the criminal courts knows that police perjury is commonplace." As these judges attest, this could not happen without active complicity of many prosecutors and judges. Yet there is little apparent concern to remedy that serious abuse of the oath to tell the truth—even among those who now claim to be so concerned with the corrosive influences of perjury on our legal system. The sad reality appears to be that most people care about perjury only when they disapprove of the substance of the lie or of the person who is lying.

Lying under oath doesn't carry the negative deterrent it once did. Lying has become accepted and in many cases, even promoted in publications, sitcoms, the classroom, and more. Distinctions and justifications are made for things such as white lies-the ones that supposedly harm no one—yet unbeknownst to most, it is these very kinds of things upon which the slippery slopes of destruction are made. The following excerpt is from a 2003 article in The Virginian Pilot:

While lawyers and legal scholars contend that the justice system relies on truth-telling, some say that being under oath may not be taken as seriously as it once was. "In the year 2000, there are fewer people who believe they will be subjected to divine punishment for lying under oath than there were in 1450," said John Douglass, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. [End of quote]

Perjury is rampant. Outside of tax evasion, perjury is America's number one crime. The following paragraphs are from a 1998 Knight-Ridder article:

"If you converted perjury to water," McCann said, "it would flood the place." Across the country, parents and spouses and brothers and sisters provide false alibis for loved ones facing criminal charges. Police officers, forced to justify why they did a pat-down search and arrested someone on the street for drug possession, lie so often it even has a name: "dropsy testimony." (It goes like this: "The perpetrator saw me and my fellow police officers, then dropped a packet of drugs to the ground and ran away.")"Every day. You see it every day," said Chicago defense lawyer Sam Adam. "There's an old legal expression: In Cook County, the outcome depends upon the preponderance of the perjury." With all this perjury going on, one would expect to find a torrent of perjury charges. But it's more like a trickle, if that. McCann, for example, said that in his three decades as Milwaukee County's chief prosecutor, he has yet to file a single perjury charge stemming from a civil case. [End of quote]

Perjury is a colossal, costly problem seriously undermining the effectiveness of the world's legal system. Of course, God understood the situation implicitly and commanded directly against it in the very Ten Commandments given to Moses, written on tablets of stone. God's punishment was, by the world's standards, severe but accurate. Deuteronomy 19:18-20:

18 And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother;

19 Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you.

20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.

Man has rejected God's directive in this matter. Perjurers are rarely prosecuted—and when they are, the maximum penalty under federal law is a $10,000 fine and five years’ imprisonment. In the Knight-Ridder article referred to above the following excerpt can be found:

Even in those cases where a witness' lies have placed an innocent person in prison, or even on Death Row, those witnesses are rarely charged with perjury. When two pathologists were murdered in Marietta, Ga., in 1971, a female witness falsely implicated seven men. Based on her testimony, all were convicted. Six got life sentences, and one got the death penalty. All were later exonerated when the witness repudiated her story and another man confessed. The local prosecutor refused to charge her with perjury, calling it a "waste of taxpayers' money." [End of quote]

When God's commandments are discredited or ignored, you can expect the worst.

The cost of fraud and perjury is simply added on to the average world dweller's cost of living. To put this into perspective, consider that the average American household works two-to-three months per year to pick up the tab of perjury and theft on the job. Galatians 6:7:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

The lying spirit was the operative spirit that addressed Grandmother Eve in the garden. The lying spirit that was spawned made necessary the law of sin and death. Lying prevails in the carnal heart. It is endemic. It is natural. It is Satanic. God's Word, on the opposite end of the spectrum, is truth and life. His Word establishes His presence and defines His plan of redemption for fallen man. Those who reject His Word suffer the results of their disobedience. This is just another proof that God is, that He authored the Scriptures, and will hold all men to it on a soon—very soon—coming judgment day.

GOD SAID, Exodus 23:1:

Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness.

GOD SAID, Deuteronomy 19:16-20:

16 If a false witness rise up against any man to testify against him that which is wrong;

17 Then both the men, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and the judges, which shall be in those days;

18 And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother;

19 Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you.

20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.

MAN SAID: How dare these uneducated, easily-led Bible thumpers try to foist their old, archaic morality on me! Who are they to tell me "thou shalt not lie" or "commit adultery?" Everyone lies and a big percentage of the world commits adultery. How dare they!


Now you have THE RECORD.




References:

King James Bible

Dershowitz, A.M., "The Consequences of Perjury and Related Crimes," Congressional Testimony, 12/1/98 (documentation provided by HighBeam Research)

Jeter, A., "In Rare Case, Man Guilty of Lying to Judge in Court," The Virginian Pilot, 11/11/03 (documentation provided by HighBeam Research)

Knight-Ridder News Service, "Perjury is Hard to Prosecute," 9/28/98, The News & Record, Piedmont Triad, NC

Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language

Sweet, D., "Sacrifice, Atonement, and Legal Ethics" (notes), Yale Law Journal, 10/1/03

Walsh, M.W., "I.R.S. to Ask Working Poor for Proof on Tax Credits," New York Times, 4/25/03

Weissman, R., "Corporate Perjury and Obstruction of Justice," www.essential.org, 2/11/99

• Go Further With Christ
• Email To a Friend
• Comments or Questions?