If you know the Ten Commandments, you know this one:

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor

This is, of course, part of Christian doctrine – and if you are to believe the, uh, believers – an absolute. Don’t lie, period. No weaseling around, right?

Well…

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

In light of above reasoning, it should be no wonder if the church got angry at such blatant sophistry. They would rightly denounce it as ‘relativism’, when clear-cut commands are intentionally undermined by smart-assed equivocating, trying to evade the issue. What will the world come to if any half-decent atheistic schmuck with a softcopy of ‘Hitchslapped’ can bang out an excuse for lying?

Except, of course, that above relativistic doublespeak comes from none other than one of Christianity’s (well, the Protestants, anyway) most revered priests: Martin Luther (not Dr. King).

It wasn’t Stephen Colbert who invented ‘truthiness’ – it was Luther; the church has long since mastered it’s use. Colbert only gave it a much deserved name.

Before, it was called quod licet iovi, non licet bovi