“Do
Not Spread Rumours”
As
I said last post, the 9th Commandment “Do not give false testimony
against your neighbour” was primarily about under-girding an
honest, fair and effective justice system. It clearly also had an
immediate application to what we might call “the court of public
opinion”. People can be harmed, their livelihood stripped away,
even killed by gossip and rumour.
Writing
about the Bible's high view of proper law courts I did not quote
chapter-and-verse because it seemed to me that on even a cursory
reading of the Bible it was emerged as almost a “self evident
truth”. However for the extension of the 9th Commandment
to gossip and slander I shall provide a few quotes.
Exodus
23 combines both ideas as well as pointing out the temptation to “say
what everyone else is saying” plus the twin temptations to play
favourites either for or against the poor.:
“Do
not spread false reports. Do not help a guilty person by being a
false witness. Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give
testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the
crowd, and do not show favouritism to a poor person in a lawsuit.”
… “Do not deny justice to
your poor people in their lawsuits.”
In
Mark 7.27 Jesus lists slander as one of the evil things that
originate in a human heart and separate that person from God.
1
Corinthians 6 lists slander as one of the sins-of-habit that mark a
person who will not enter heaven. This should scare us a great deal
more than it does! It should trouble us all the more when a word
search
for “slander” in the New Testament turns up frequent calls for
Christians to stop doing it –
indicating that it was an active temptation in the young churches,
and even fears
as in 2 Corinthians 12:20 that it could
be rife in a congregation.
So
my understanding of New Testament teaching is that slander is a
serious evil, yet one so attractive to our human nature that even (or
possibly especially) in a close community-of-faith,
it will be a constantly recurring problem.
It
has certainly been my experience that gossip and slander are not only
rife at every level in Christian churches and communities, but that
it is one of the few bid sins that is seldom challenged.
Today's
Christians, from the pew to the episcopate, seem to have cut the
commands against gossip
and slander out of their
minds and out of their Bibles. We really need to change this!
In
a society where even the churches, who aught to be guardians of
morals, have so disastrously failed, it is not surprising that
slander and false accusation are running rampant.
Small-town
gossips did a lot of harm, but it was limited by propinquity. In a
small secular community the effect of gossip was moderated by these
two facts: you actually
knew the target as a person and you
had strict social
conventions.
It
is again “sociology 1.01” that in small towns people do
gossip about each other
but do not
in general let that gossip influence their behaviour. The classic
illustration is this:
Two
ladies are
tearing apart the character of lady Number 3 with vicious gossip.
Lady 3 approaches. They
immediately break off their gossip, turn, smile, and greet her like a
long lost sister. It is not hypocrisy, just beneficial social
convention which has evolved so that humans can co-exist in groups,
kicking in.
Of
course there is a limit to what situations this convention can save.
Lynch mobs, witch hunts,
single mothers being hounded out of town are all
historic reminders of
that. However
my point is only that in a small community social conventions gave
some
protection.
Also
this benefit does not exist in
religious communities and the like – in sociological terms what
they foster is not
“community” but “communion” which is a very different thing!
They also make “The Faith” in whatever terms they understand it
as paramount and so are prone to doing a great deal of evil in the
name of protecting it!
Secondly
in the village community, the target of gossip was a person you knew.
This did not always save them . But often it did. The
classic example is the person who says: “Jews
may be (whatever the latest propaganda said) … but Isaac next door
– well he is not like
that!” You knew Isaac,
he was a person.
Once
again historically the failures of this are obvious – in Rwanda for
instance pastors who were of the Hutu tribe betrayed and even
themselves murdered men, women and children of their own
congregations who were of the Tutsi tribe. Human evil is a truly
frightening thing! So again my point is only that social proximity
affords some
protection.
Today
in this “global village” we touch via technology people we do not
know personally, and towards whom the old conventions of village
behaviour do not apply. Little wonder slander is rearing its ugly
head as a bis problem.
Technology
has made it so easy
to hurt a human being we do not know.
A
person can be demonised in a face-book post. A touch of the finger is
all it takes to “like” the slander on our page. Little wonder
these can “go viral”.
The
target is not a person we know – just a “thing” we want to
hate. The target has no chance to tell us their side of the story: we
have become judge, jury and executioner without even hearing counter
evidence. This is a terrible travesty
of justice.
Twitter
can do the same. I don't do or read twitter. However from news
reports there are people who see themselves as moulders of public
opinion who tweet prolifically. Again rash, intemperate, unfair and
possibly baseless slander trips easily off their fingertips. An
instant of rage
or even just pique and the tweet multiplies. Like a social version of
a nuclear
chain reaction these bombs go off.
This
scourge of slander-on-steroids must be defeated.
The
solution I put forward is a person-by-person choice for us not
to do evil by “following the crowd in doing wrong”. Plus a
person-by-person choice to radiate disapproval to those who do.
I
likened tweets and facebook slander
to nuclear chain reactions. In my younger days I did
study
nuclear engineering. A nuclear reactor can be shut down by
introducing material that absorbs neutrons but
does not multiply them and
does not bounce them back
into the ring. People can
do that with gossip.
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