The Real Hypocrites

My concern for the unfaithful Gov.,is his lack of responsibility for the office he represents.
How can he be trusted to be there for his constituents when they need him? Obviously Sanford has a stress and emotional problem and we should pray for him and the family.

What happened to Mark Sanford was nothing short of tragic. I actually liked the guy. I didn't like some of his views on the social issues, but I liked that he was a man of principle and had a more traditional view of the constitution. But there's no excuse for hypocrisy.

What you said, Valiant, is valid (no pun intended). A man who condemns sinners yet who is guilty of the very sin he is condemning is without excuse. All throughout the bible and all throughout the holy texts of other faiths including Buddhism, Islam, and Shintoism, one of the chief principles is humility. The ability to be humble even when in a position of power is a powerful virtue. Jesus himself said that the top commandment is to love god with all thy heart and love thy brother as thy self. And in Sanford's case, you don't do this sort of thing to the people you love, lying and deceiving not just his wife, but the people who placed their trust in him.

As an atheist, I come to see even greater value in the virtues of humility. It is humility, the ability to be humble before others and care for others without condition, that espouses the greatest moral proclivity. I would fully be willing to forgive Sandord if he was to stand up and not just say he was sorry, but say he was wrong to judge others by a standard that he himself did not meet. When he reaches that point of humility, he'll have my forgiveness.

is the one who accuses someone else in lieu of confessing his own sin. The most accusatory of us should be spending more time in confession. How we treat others is a real indicator of where we stand personally on hypocrisy.

The point of the article is the exceeding deceitfulness of sin…

Believers justify sin and think they can get away with it; unbelievers deny sin and think they can escape its judgments. Sin is our great enemy; it is always fatal and the physicians of the soul like the scientists and politicians have lost their way.

Sin, dishonesty, evil, bad karma, or whatever you want to call it is bad no matter how you spin it. For believer and non-believer alike, it damages them as a person and as a human being. In free societies governed by law and order, these people do not propogate as well as those who don't even if they do get away with it. But of all the egregious acts committed by people of every background, hypocrisy is one of the worst.

In Dante's Inferno, hypocrites are relegated to the eight circle of Hell, one below the lowest. It is relgated to those for fraud and trechery. In Bolgia 6, it describes hypocrites as having to walk endlessly along wearing lead cloaks, as to symbolize the weight of their own hypocrisy.

To lie and decieve is bad enough. But there's a big difference between telling little white lies and just blatently lying to parade one's self as being righteous while secretly committing the very act they condemn. That's what makes hypocrisy so egregious and why in practically every culture it is considered the worst of transgressions.