What happens if we lose veracity? Veracity means “conformity to facts and truth”. Veracity synonyms include words like accuracy, credibility, honesty, and trustworthiness. What happens if we lose these things? I suppose what happens is the opposite, when the antonyms take over. Antonyms of veracity include words like deceit, dishonesty, falsehood, lying, and inaccuracy.
Nearly all of the Ten Commandments are concerned ultimately with persons. In each instance, an act is seen as evil, not in abstraction, but in its effect on human beings, who are precious because they are made in God’s image. Killing, for example, is evil, because it is persons who suffer and die. Theft is evil because it is taking something that belongs to another person. Lying is evil because it harms one’s neighbor.
All these moral laws are simply ways of showing what it means to uphold the dignity and value of human life, including that of others as well as our own. All of us seek the dignity and value of our own lives, but the moral law says we ought to seek the same for other members of the human family. The moral laws are detailed applications of what it means to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Unless veracity is part of the foundation of our society and democracy, we labor in vain.
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