Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace

by John Mark Comer

The celebrated scholar Hannah Arendt, in her seminal 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, said, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between…true and false…no longer exist[s].”

the devil’s primary stratagem to drive the soul and society into ruin is deceptive ideas that play to disordered desires, which are normalized in a sinful society.

We sin because we believe a lie about what will make us happy.

The problem with the “as long as it doesn’t harm anybody” rubric is it requires an agreed-upon definition of harm. Something that, in the secular, pluralistic world we inhabit, we don’t have. We no longer have a transcendent moral authority such as God or the Bible to appeal to. We don’t even have the Enlightenment idea of the laws of nature anymore. All we have is the self and the state. The problem is, all sorts of things are legal that do not lead to human flourishing.