More on my guilty pleasure

A few weeks ago I blogged about the new show on ABC, 666 Park Avenue.

I still find the show fascinating from a theological perspective. Many of the tenants of 999 Park Avenue make a deal with the devil character, Gavin Doran, only thinking of the immediate rewards and not thinking about the price. For instance, this past week a woman wanted to be an extremely successful writer. The deal she struck with Gavin guaranteed her success, however the downside to her deal was whatever she wrote came true. She worked for a prominent New York newspaper and wrote news stories that were based on lies and fiction. She winds up dead because of the webs of deceit she created only to be successful.

The storyline got me thinking about lies and then yesterday I heard a story on the radio that seemed like it came out of a Hollywood script. A local woman told her co-workers that her infant daughter died. Her co-workers donated money to her to cover the costs of the funeral and then discovered the lie when they arrived at the church for the funeral. The woman said she wanted attention and used the money to buy clothes and toys for her child. Well, she's definitely getting attention now because she's going to jail. This case is extreme and while the law might assign more weight to a particular kind of lie, does God?

A lie is a lie is a lie and I know I lie.

Why do I lie? Uh...well...it's usually to avoid something unpleasant. For instance, I might tell a friend that she looks great in an outfit so that I don't have to tell her that her butt looks big (to my friends: if you've gone shopping with me, you know I don't do this). While I might not be signing my soul away to the devil with a little white lie, I am definitely getting an immediate reward of not having a fight with my friend. Rarely do we think of the cost of a little white lie. What might happen when my friend goes to a wedding in her new dress and some tipsy family member makes a crack about her caboose? That "little" white lie could end a friendship or at the very least create a lot of tension while the question of trust hangs between us.

It's a heavy cost for something so "little", but hey, that's the way the devil works.

***I have to make one correction from my last post about the show: the protagonists of the show are not married, they're living together. ***