The "...deceit of sin..."

Take care, brothers and sisters,
that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart,
so as to forsake the living God.
Encourage yourselves daily while it is still “today,”
so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin.
We have become partners of Christ
if only we hold the beginning of the reality firm until the end.   -Hebrews 3:12-14

I have been presented with "evidence" that a person's sexual orientation is fixed from birth, much like their skin color. The typical evidence is "...I always knew I was gay and since I am the ultimate authority on what I feel, it cannot be disputed..." 

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget is considered the father of developmental psychology. He is the one who carefully documented the order in which children mastered various skills and he proposed the framework in which each skill because a stepping-stone for the next skill.

“Psychologist Jean Piaget reported that his earliest memory was of his nurse defending him against a potential kidnapper at age two. He distinctly recalled sitting frightened in the baby carriage while the nurse fought off the man (incurring a scratch on her face in the process), and the police officer chasing away the kidnapper with his short white baton. Piaget was even able to describe the officer’s uniform in detail. His family, relieved that the nurse had prevented his kidnapping, rewarded her with a gold watch.

“Thirteen years later, the nurse returned the gold watch to the family accompanied by a letter confessing that she had made up the story because she wanted to raise the family’s opinion of her.

(In fact, the nurse had sustained the facial scratches when she and her lover briefly abandoned little Jean for some romance in the shrubberies)

“Piaget used this false memory to emphasize the role of others’ influences on one’s memories. He noted that the nurse frequently had recounted the story in his presence, and others then had repeated the story in his hearing, thus creating the memories he had adopted as his own.'  

“Piaget noted that even in his old age those memories persisted as clear events, even though he knew them to be false.”   -From “The Encyclopedia of the Brain and Brain Disorders” by Carol Turkington and Joseph Harris (2009)

If you have been a parent, then you realize one of the signs that you are being told a lie is when there is too much detail, too much "sincere belief" emoted in the telling.

Most of us sleep-walk through life and do not attend to details. It is the story-teller who creates details to lend credence to the story in their own mind.

In time, the story replaces reality because their brain sees the words it constructed and commanded the mouth to say as "evidence".

One example

 

I was not at the January 6 events in 2021.

Based on the very little I saw and the emotions of the time, I believe that most of the people who entered the Capitol did not want to over-throw the Constitution of the United States. Rather, they wanted to slow the rush to certify so the results of the certification would be accepted by the entire Country.

This belief, that it was not an insurrection but an effort to ensure credibility was not the one that was entertained by Pelosi and her party.

Now, due to the political capital that has been irretrievably invested in "...it was an attempt to overthrow the country...", fully half of the country cannot accept any evidence to the contrary. It is the equivalent of asking them to hear a frequency that is beyond their range of hearing.

I believe that is the message in the Biblical quote highlighted at the beginning of this post. To willingly be a "false witness", that is to repeat what one has no first-hand evidence of, is to give the devil the keys to your heart and soul.

That is "...the deceit of sin..."