It's easy enough to figure out, unfortunately

Submitted by Quiberon Bay (United States), Nov 30, 2009 at 23:03

In the case of many leftists and at least some Islamists, a possible answer is deliberate misrepresentation.

At early common law, atheists were held to be incompetent to testify because they lacked the terrors of answering to Divine judgment. In U. S. vs. Looper (1960), the Supreme Court noted:

In the course of the development of the common law the rationale of the oath was to invoke the belief as to divine retribution to follow false swearing as an inducement to tell the truth. The earlier cases emphasized the necessity for belief in immediate punishment, i.e., the witness' being struck down by divine punishment as he was testifying or some punishment in the present life, but eventually the belief of punishment in the life to come was deemed sufficient. This rationale is, of course, predicated on belief in a Supreme Being with power to visit immediate or prospective punishment.

And, as we know, some (not all) Muslims will practice the deliberate deception of taqiyya, lying with religious sanction.

In either case, whether through a lack of what King David called "the fear of God," or through an untruth promoted by clergy, a person who stands in the main stream of Western Civilization and believes in honest discourse is at a disadvantage.

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